Taking advantage of the latency in rollout of the voice calling feature on WhatsApp, spammers and greedy marketers have come up with an innovative idea to spread fake WhatsApp messages. The fake Whatsapp calling feature invites, which looks like the one in picture below, prompts a user to click on a particular third party link.
Fake WhatsApp Calling Feature Invites scam
The website link however is not official and leads to a malicious page which asks one to invite certain number of friends to unlock Whatsapp Calling feature.
Congratulations!! You’ve been invited to try Whatsapp Calling!
Invite Your 10 Active Whatsapp Friends or groups to Activate Whatsapp Calling
As soon as you click on “Invite Now”, your WhatsApp will open and you can send invitation to any of your friends or groups
You’ll have to invite minimum 10 active friends or groups one by one
You can click on “Continue” after inviting 10 friends or groups to activate voice calling on Whatsapp.
The malicious script in the page spreads the same message to friends in your network leading to a viral mass spamming with a false “Calling feature” promise.
The recent introduction of voice calling feature on Whatsapp created lot of buzz among its users. During the recent MWC 2015 event, WhatsApp’s CEO Jan Koum said the company is bringing voice calling feature to the app. Accordingly, the Whatsapp calling feature landed up on Android platform, but the rollout happened on invite only basis – meaning, the person with the call feature had to exclusively place a call to people in his network to unlock this feature and also one had to run the latest version of the application.
As of now, the sought-after Whatsapp calling feature is available for limited set of audience in Android and is being tested for iOS platform. The feature is expected to be available across all mobile platforms including Apple’s iOS, Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Blackberry in coming days.
We advice our readers not to click on suspicious links which claims to be an invite for Whatsapp calls.
