With an audience comprising nearly two-quarters of the entire world, WhatsApp is a boon to a cybercriminal, as the reach of a fraudulent campaign can be enormous and the results lucrative. And since we are in summer, nothing better than the bait of free plane tickets.
WhatsApp scam with hook Iberia
You get a message on your WhatsApp mobile from a +34 number that you don’t know. The message is from Iberia, and it offers you a raffle in which there is at stake “5,000 round trip tickets to Europe for free”. Who does not feel like it, especially at zero cost? The bad thing is what happens if you decide to pay attention to the message, which comes from the number of phone +34 644229319 used by a chatbot.
If you click on the link, you will be redirected to a website under the URL name ‘tinyurl5.ru’ -And the domain pointing to Russia should scale you down a bit. You will be asked to answer a questionnaire of several very simple questions, and thus you can opt for the prize. The next screen is a minigame of choosing boxes and guessing where the prize goes. Normally on the second try you already get it.
No hay premio, solo Phishing
Once you are one of the 5,000 winners, Iberia asks you to share the promo with 20 more WhatsApp contacts and give an address so they can send you the prize. And with this they already have your data, and you will never have a free ticket. Of course, Iberia points out that they would never ask for these data or personal passwords from their users, and even less so in contests like this.
So sorry, but it’s all an elaborate social engineering trick to get hold of your data. Always be wary of this type of draw, especially numbers that you do not know.
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