How scammers will steal your money? Stay Safe on WhatsApp

Every Platform in the world is full of scammers and people who do a living on fraud.

As per the UN report, the world population is increasing rapidly, and therefore so is hunger and poverty is increasing. With the increase of these factors in the world and society it is being noticed that the crime rate and scams happening are increasing rapidly.

We all know that scammers are everywhere on social media, but social platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp are one of the most targeted platforms for social media scammers. You can never be easy about them because scammers on WhatsApp can fool anyone at any time….. Yes, they can talk to you as your best friend or a relative and force you to pay them an amount. Of course, they are not gonna tell you that they are scamming you and they won’t return your money.

You might be thinking, how can a person pay an amount to some stranger, They will tell you that they are your best friend, son, brother, father or any of your relatives and normally many people fall into their trap and pay them the required amount. Such scams have become a business for scammers and every year many people got scammed. Scammers mostly use voice-over IP numbers commonly known as VoIP numbers.

What are VoIP numbers?

VoIP stands for voice over internet protocol number and is assigned to you after you register for service (a VoIP service). VoIP numbers are similar to landline numbers and can be used to call from any device which contains internet service But WhatsApp doesn’t permit you to use VoIP numbers to create a WhatsApp account or to link it with WhatsApp business. Somehow social media scammers manage to get access to WhatsApp with this VoIP number and try to grab money some from you.  

Sometimes, they will text you as a stranger like:

”Sorry, who are you? I found you in my address book”. They will pretend to be nice to you to make you feel like you are talking to a friend and to gain your trust in them. Scammers will ask you for your personal details like name, age and most probably ask you to add them on social media.

Their main target is to get your public info like your social media friends and your family info because later on, they can use them to blackmail you and ask you for money. They will try to get intimate with you and ask you for your confidential images, in case you do not give them your confidential images they will edit your photo and make it look reals. Scammers will use these photos of you to blackmail you and ask you to pay some amount.

What you should do to protect yourself from such scenarios is:

• Do not respond to unknown numbers.
• Do not share your private information with any stranger.
• Do not add them to your social account.
• Always make full use of WhatsApp’s privacy settings and hide your personal info like profile pictures from unknown numbers.
• Report such “Blackmailing Messages” to WhatsApp.
• Do not pay anything to scammers, because they will not stop blackmailing you.

These are some techniques that will prevent you from scam and even if you get stuck in any sort of scam, do not pay them because once they get the payment, they will never stop blackmailing you. Every day there is a new social media scam story coming up from multiple users, this is because we fell into their trap without verifying it. We must verify the person we are talking to, whether we really know them or not.

There is a recently famous incident of a Facebook scam, where women give 5000$ to scammers who claimed that the woman has won the prize of 50000$. Do check out the whole story by clicking on this Read More.