How to Protect your WhatsApp Account from Being Stolen

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2 How to Protect your WhatsApp Account from Being Stolen

In this post, you will be learning how to protect your WhatsApp account from being stolen.

2020 has been a remarkable year, particularly for the global outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. This event pushed people to move their business and other activities online. However, it led to a spike in the occurrence of cyberattacks.

Scammers are now everywhere online looking for innocent people to prey on. One needs to be very careful as there is a practically unlimited number of ways these cybercriminals operate.

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WhatsApp has remained one of the most used platforms for cyberattacks. Recently, many WhatsApp were attacked in a way that their mobile phone is switched to another which will eventually lead to a transfer of account. Once this is done, they access to your contacts and groups you belong and start sending out chats to find victims to rob. In turn, your contact starts to lose trust in you.

Changing a phone number transfers a WhatsApp account to the new number. This is done by sending an SMS authentication to the previous phone number to verify the process. In short, you are allowed to modify the instant messenger app while you switch numbers. However, cybercriminals have found a loophole which paves unlawful access to a victim's account.

How WhatsApp Account can be stolen

It appears that cybercriminals use your phone number to write to WhatsApp and request SMS code for authentication. Further, they reach out to you in a way to request the code. This is usually done while they pretend to be close contact, with an argument that they made a mistake when sending the code.

However, if this happens to you, it won’t be that easy to recover your account. You would have to report the theft of the account to WhatsApp and request that the account is cancelled.