Haryana Police warn of WhatsApp fraud

Chandigarh, August 28

The Haryana Police have issued an alert to Whatsapp users about a new trend of cybercrime used by fraudsters for hijacking WhatsApp accounts to carry out financial transactions.

Advising the people to stay alert about such scammers, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Navdeep Singh Virk said cyber criminals were resorting to new means to defraud individuals and organizations, as many activities had moved online during the Covid pandemic.

Modus Operandi

• Hacker creates a fake account and puts the WhatsApp logo as display picture, posing to be the account of technical team
• The target is sent a fake message to share the six-digit verification code
• The target easily gets tricked and shares the verification PIN
• The hackers log into the target’s WhatsApp account to send fraudulent messages to friends asking for money, PIN, OTP etc

“In this new kind of cybercrime, the fraudsters trick the gullible people by taking over their WhatsApp account and use it for communicating with their friends and family members for carrying out financial transactions,” he said.

He also outlined a series of preventive and precautionary measures and advised the users to never share verification code sent from anyone for any reason. He also suggested activating ‘two-step verification’ for social media accounts. This will enhance the security of their account and even if the attacker gets access to the verification code, a password will still be needed to successfully log into the account.