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“They communicate to my contacts, they tell them that I changed the number and then they ask for money. It’s not me who writes to them.” The emergency call through social networks was written by provincial deputy Rubén Eslaiman, who is vice president III of the Chamber of Deputies of Buenos Aires. The message circulated on the networks on Monday and the legislator made the complaint to the Cybercrime Area of the Buenos Aires Police, but reported that one of his contacts managed to scam him for a million pesos.
This is not the first scam known through the social messaging network so far this summer. Before the victims of public renown had been the humorist Roberto Moldavsky and the national deputy Facundo Suarez Lastra. “My WhatsApp was hacked. If you receive a message from me asking for money… It’s a scam! Thank you very much”, Suárez Lastra had warned four days before Eslaiman.
“Urgent, please read. Hello friends, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter have just been hacked,” the provincial deputy had written in his tweet, with such a level of desperation that minutes later he retweeted the same message. After warning, Eslaiman went to the headquarters of the Cybercrime Area of the Buenos Aires Police, where an investigation was opened to detect the origin of the cyberattack.
The provincial legislator, in dialogue with the site Buenos Aires Deputiessaid that the behavior of the cybercriminals was to write to his contacts from another phone, assuring that he had already changed the number, and request money transfers.
According to the deputy, before his WhatsApp was hacked, he had already suffered several hacking attempts on his social networks starting in January. According to the deputy’s complaint, the transfer of one million pesos made by one of his contacts, deceived by an alleged emergency situation in Eslaiman, went to a ghost account.
What to do when faced with a WhatsApp scam
- Never give personal data through WhatsApp to strangers
- Do not send passwords or access to bank accounts
- If you have any questions regarding a possible scam, request that they contact you regularly by phone.
- In the case of vaccines, the contacts are always formal, with automatic messages, and not personalized, much less with calls through WhatsApp.
- If the scam has already happened, alert acquaintances to prevent them from sending money.
- Quickly regain access to WhatsApp. If a new access code is requested and it is loaded quickly in the app, access can be obtained once more.
- Quickly change the passwords for access to mail and others to avoid new problems.
