For days now, a new fraud attempt has been circulating through WhatsApp that, apparently, is intensifying in the last hours, since thousands of shipments of a fraudulent message that begin with the words “Hello Winner” have been detected.
At Christmas, new scams usually appear through WhatsApp, so it is advisable to exercise caution
This is not the first time that scams have circulated through the instant messaging application. They are usually common throughout the year and you must always exercise extreme caution, but around Christmas, year after year, more deception attempts tend to arise.
In this case, it is easy to detect the possible scam, but it does not hurt to remember it because there can always be people who are deceived. The fraudulent message is the following (there may be different versions but they are very similar to each other):
The scam is easy to recognize because the message in the first place is sent by an unknown phone number. As can be seen in the image, it uses the country code +62, which corresponds to Indonesia. If there is no contact in this country, even though we can see a person’s photo as a profile picture, this is the first reason to be suspicious, but it is not the only one.
The wording of the text leaves no room for doubt. First, it refers to the user as «Hello Winner«, So he does not know his name or identity. It just tries to trick you with a cheap bait: a 200 euro bonus and 30 free spins.
Soon it indicates that to obtain that economic prize you have to make a previous deposit. This way of acting is very common in telephone scams, by instant messaging or in the classic scam emails: the user is asked to enter a certain amount to receive a bigger prize. It goes without saying that once the money has been entered, the communication disappears and the promised prize is never obtained.
In this case, in addition, several links are included to which the user is requested to access. It is recommended that you never click on a link that comes from an unknown sender on WhatsApp, and even if it were known, the most prudent thing is not to click on any link that does not know what the content will be when you open it. Precisely for this reason, many times WhatsApp offers a preview of the article or website that will be displayed when clicking the link.
If a message of this type is received this Christmas or any other suspicious message, it is best to delete it and not even interact with the supposed sender. Of course, you should not forward or click on the links, much less make any income.