Journalist Jorge Raventos received a call for WhatsApp and recognized the logo of the official app Look after. When she answered, on the other end of the line a friendly man offered her a turn to take the fifth dose of the covid vaccine. He said no, but he asked about the pneumonia vaccine. “Wait a second,” she replied. A moment later, he spoke again. “Ready. He is now going to receive a six-digit code on his cell phone. Do you repeat it?” As soon as Raventos dictated the number, he knew that they had cheated. The kind man began to treat him badly and after a few minutes his daughter wrote a message to his wife: “I already transferred the $70,000 that dad asked me for,” he warned.
raventos suffered a scam more and more frequent. This is a kind of phishing: criminals take possession of the account WhatsApp of his victim to communicate with his contacts and ask them for money.
In her case, her daughter did not suspect anything when she received a message from her father’s number asking her to transfer that sum to a specific account. She believed that it was a payment that the man had to make. “A chain is made. They reached out to a friend through my contacts and various friends and family members of hers sent her money. In total, between 300 and 400 thousand pesos were made,” he said. raventos.
How WhatsApp scams work
Daniel Monastersky He is a lawyer specializing in cybersecurity. When he heard the story of Raventos he was not surprised: “It is very common. Now the excuse of vaccine shifts appears, but they can tell you anything. The issue is to convince you to repeat what code came to you, ”he explained.
The criminals communicate with their victim through a cell phone and, in parallel, with another device they try to access their account. WhatsApp. They download the application and when they want to associate it with the owner’s number, they have to enter a code to validate the identity, which is the number that the person receives on their phone. In the case of Raventos, the excuse for asking him to tell them the code was to solve the vaccine process.
With the code, they now have control of the account WhatsApp of their victim and contact their contacts asking for money. Even more: in recent times it has been recorded that these types of criminals tend to rent bank accounts to people in a vulnerable situation. “At the police station they told me that the prosecution is going to communicate. But they told me that this is the reason why it is difficult to trace the money to find the scammers”, Raventos recounted.
Monastersky He agreed on the difficulties in finding the perpetrators of these crimes and recalled some key tips to avoid falling into these traps: “It’s good to have double verification. But you can also link the account WhatsApp to an email and put a password on it. That is another obstacle to registering on another device, ”she concluded.
