Beware of these 5 recent WhatsApp scams

| Published: Saturday, May 26, 2018, 19:01 [IST]

It would be an understatement to say that WhatsApp is popular. In fact, it is an app that is used by a million users worldwide. The app comes loaded with wonderful features that has something to offer for everyone and allows you to customize the experience you have using the app.

It also allows you to protect yourself from people who you do not wish to interact with by giving you the option of blocking them. But unfortunately, there are a lot of factors out there which aim to take advantage of people or sabotage the efficiency of the app through scams and bugs.

WhatsApp bug that disables the blocking feature

There is a bug on WhatsApp nowadays which creates a lot of problems for its users. This bug lets users who have been blocked by a user to send messages to that user. However, the best fix for this particular problem is to unblock the contact that you have blocked and unblock them again.

Chatwatch spy

This app is available for both Android and iOS. What it does is make use of information about the target's offline or online status in order to let the user of the app know about their activities. There is also an option available which can determine if two WhatsApp contacts have been communicating with each other.

Textbomb

A string of characters which ends with a crying laughing emoji is reportedly responsible for forcing some iPhone and Android users to restart their devices. One of these messages read "This is very interesting!" followed by the emoji. The information about this bug was posted and circulated via Reddit.

Hang bomb

Another forward message that has managed to reportedly hang the WhatsApp app for a while reads "If you touch the black point, your WhatsApp will hang." The message holds a black icon clicking on which makes the app freeze or become unresponsive. Apparently, there is a blank space between the black dot and the text. When this message is converted into HTML, it reveals that the text contains RLM (right-to-left mark), this character is an invisible formatting character and its job is to tell left-to-right text and right-to-left text apart. In English text, the directional formatting that is used is LRM whereas the one used in the WhatsApp message uses RLM. The wrong directional formatting character is said to be the culprit which is making the app crash.

Pizza hut scam

The message that the scamsters are using says "Pizza Hut is Giving-away 4 FREE Large Pizza to everyone on its 60th Anniversary. Get your 4 free Pizza at: ." Visiting the link in your browser and completing the steps given will allow you to win a fake prize which tells you can win your fake prize by nominating 7 friends and asks you to key in their details. They use this to gather personal information.