The Higher Headquarters of the National Police of La Rioja has alerted citizens that in recent days there have been numerous deceptions through a scam by the WhatsApp messaging app known as ‘Six-digit scam’ with which you can lose your control of your account and fraud is committed with your identity.
With almost 36 million registered users throughout Spain, WhatsApp is the most used app in our country, and therefore has become one of the main targets for cyberattacks by criminals, since the more people the more likely your attack will be successful.
And while it’s true that the company owned by Meta works and adds tools and functions that protect security and privacy almost monthly of users, such as hiding the IP address of calls or having a second profile for unknown numbers, scams continue to occur on this platform.
However, despite the fact that the measures are up to date, many deceptions do not depend on defenses but from the knowledge of the users, since there are many cyberattacks that are based on social engineering.
‘Six-digit scam’
As the authorities from Rioja warn, a campaign has been detected in recent weeks that is managing to block users from accessing their own WhatsApp account, and which is subsequently being used to impersonate identities.
This scam Start with a message from a friend or acquaintance of yours, or at least that’s what it seems, because they write to you from that person’s account but in reality they have impersonated them. Here it tells you that You have accidentally given your phone number and you will receive a verification code and when it arrives, you have to tell them.
Being supposedly a friend or family member, we want to help you and then as soon as we receive said code we give it to you. At the moment, we have just given the cybercriminal the key to our account Whatsappp, and in this way can block our access and we lose control of our profile.
Once here, you can take our profile and use it to carry out crimes and scams under our name and they can even impersonate us to carry out the same scam on the rest of our contacts.
