Arrested for defrauding thousands of euros with a WhatsApp spy app

The Police has arrested a 23-year-old young man from Murciafor frauding more than 40,000 euros in a couple of months thanks to a system to deceive users with the claim of the well-known messaging application WhatsApp Thus, under the premise of spy on other people's conversations of this tool, it managed to capture users who offered Your data and phone numbers and those who ended up subscribing to a high-cost Premium messaging service that reported you all these benefits.

Last month we learned, thanks to the official Police account on the social network Twitter, the existence of tools forSpy on other people's WhatsApp conversations Some fake applications known as WhatsAppSpy or WhatsAppSpy that promised to give the user access to the conversations of others but, in reality, it was a system forinvoluntarily subscribing to a payment service to the unsuspecting One of these applications was the one used by said young man, who through an apparently simple system obtained the data of more than 11,000 users in a short time to develop the scam

The system was simple but effective Using the claim of WhatsAppand the tempting option to spy on conversations To do so, it had a web page where the logo of this tool and that allowed to enter the telephone number with which you could download the spy application However, what actually happened is that the user subscribed to a Premium messaging service with a cost of between 1 , 45 and 7.20 euros, depending on the operating company. A system that has allowed the young detainee to get hold of more than 40,000 euros in a couple of months

However, the crimes do not end here. To publicize this miraculous, but actually fake spy app, it went as far as to steal more than 11,000 user accounts from a social network through the technique known asphising In this way imitated the website of the social network so that users could enter theirmail accounts and passwords thinking they were in the original service. Thus, he managed to get hold of contact lists to send to and spam messages of the fake application WhatsAppSpy so that more users fell into the trap.

The Police recall that both the phising, as well as the espionage of messages and private information are crimes punishable by law Therefore, the best way to avoid this type of scam is to use the common sense and avoid ads and apps that encourage crime or offer to perform actions illegal and that no other tool allows Also, do not hesitate to report these types of cases to the authorities, facilitating action to prevent other users from being harmed.

And keep in mind that WhatsApp is a messaging application only for smartphones and with notable security barriers, despite past problems. Therefore, we must be wary of tools that allow the use of this application on computers, and always avoid offering user data, passwords and phone numbers outside of the original application or service.In addition, as much as possible, avoid public WiFi connections where third parties may have inserted viruses and information theft tools.