In WhatsApp chats, a “creepy message” has been shared for some time that completely crashes the application. But what tricks do fraudsters actually use and how can you protect yourself against such WhatsApp spam? We’ll tell you.

Perhaps you have already come into contact with it: At least since 2017, WhatsApp chats around the world have said that a so-called ” scary message ” has been going around, which contains a complete jumble of letters.

If you open this message, your app will crash immediately – in such a way that it cannot be opened again afterwards.

You will have to reinstall WhatsApp afterwards if you want to use it again. So you could say that the spam message destroys your chat history. They’re gone if you haven’t made a backup in advance .

WhatsApp spam: these are the tricks that scammers use

WhatsApp spam like this is not uncommon. Sometimes it is of the harmless kind and just forces you to reinstall the app. But it can also cause more damage and infect your smartphone with viruses, for example.

In the case of the “creepy message”, for example, the fraudsters used characters that WhatsApp cannot read. That’s why the app just crashes when you open it. The bug can also occur if the message lands on your smartphone as a virtual contact file (VCF).

But there is another way. In 2019, for example, fraudsters lured people with free data . In truth, there was a clickbait trap hidden behind the seductive offer. The masterminds wanted to achieve a higher reach for a website.

In the same year, Android users were also confronted with the “ Agent Smith ” virus , which used popular apps such as WhatsApp to secretly install fraudulent software on users’ devices.

This is how you can protect yourself against WhatsApp spam

WhatsApp spam doesn’t get to us just like that. If we are careful, we can protect ourselves well from him.

Ideally, we ensure that dangerous spam messages do not even get onto our device. To do this, we should activate the setting in WhatsApp so that not every account can add us to groups.

To do this, go to ” Account ” in the WhatsApp settings and then navigate further. Under “ Privacy ” you can specify in the “ Groups ” category that you only add your own contacts to groups.

If a suspicious message consisting of random combinations of characters still appears on your device, you should definitely not open it. Instead, it is advisable to start the web version of WhatsApp and delete the message there.

In addition, we shouldn’t – and this is especially true for Android users – hang around in third-party stores and download unofficial apps. Otherwise we run the risk of catching a virus like “Agent Smith”.