Whatsapp Fraud Awareness| How hackers do frauds with your phone contacts
Nowadays, people are suffering from cyber fraud in which crooks target victims’ phone contacts and ask for money on their behalf of them. People are not aware of how their contacts can be targeted without installing any app.
In this article, I am gonna explain How are your contacts being stolen by the attacker? What techniques are being used to perform such fraud? How to be prevented from these frauds and report.
- Cyber Fraudster check a phone number on the truecaller app. When the user mentioned his email id in the true caller details, Fraudster copied that email id from the truecaller app as shown below picture.
2. Now fraudsters try to log in with the email id and they use the password itself the mobile number of the victim. If the victim set his phone number as a password then the fraudster successfully gets logged in with the victim’s email id.
3. Fraudster logged in with the email id on his phone and copy all the contacts to his email id or phone. Now Fraudster deletes all the contacts from the victim’s email account.
4. Now Fraudster copies the WhatsApp display picture of the victim and keeps that same profile picture on his whatsapp number. They also change their WhatsApp name pretending to be the same victim’s name.
5. Now the fraudster targets one by one all the contacts and messages them their family member is hospitalised/accidental/other emergency and asks for some money to send to his phone pe number which was sent on message.
6. Many people think their friend is in trouble and they do not call to verify if that is a genuine case or if someone is doing fraud with their name. In this case, they transfer money to the cybercriminals and they lost their hard-earned money in the fraud.
7. The person whose contacts are being targeted is not aware of this fraud and when their friend calls him to verify if he is asking for some money or not then only that person came to know about the fraud.
8. When that person thinks to be aware of their contacts not to deposit money in this fraud, but he is not able to contact their friends because his contact list has been already deleted by the fraudster.
Many people in society becoming victims of such fraud, to know more about this fraud awareness watch this video which would be helpful to understand the same.
Prevention methodologies and reporting fraud.
In this case, all the victims of this fraud need to raise the complaint to 1930 and the cybercrime portal at https://cybercrime.gov.in
The victim whose email account was compromised needs to change his password immediately and enable multi-factor authentication.
Whatsapp profile picture privacy should not be shown to everyone. It must be restricted to your contacts only.
