According to recent reports, an unknown person is currently offering the current mobile phone numbers of almost 500 million WhatsApp users for sale.
On November 16, a post was published on a well-known hacking community forum stating that a dataset containing 487 million WhatsApp user numbers from 2022 is for sale. The dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries. Around 32 million user data comes from the USA, 45 million from Egypt, 35 million from Italy, 29 million from Saudi Arabia and 20 million each from France and Turkey. The dataset for sale allegedly also contains the phone numbers of almost 10 million Russian and over 11 million British citizens. Germany is also said to be affected with around 6 million user data.
Was WhatsApp user data obtained through scraping?
Opposite Cybernews the unknown person stated that he was selling the US data set for $7,000, the British data set for $2,500 and the German data set for $2,000. This type of information is usually used by attackers for smishing and phishing attacks. How the unknown person got hold of the data is currently unknown. It cannot be ruled out that the data was collected on a large scale, also known as scraping, which violates WhatsApp's terms of use. The parent company Meta has not yet commented on the incident. Ultimately, it is important to protect yourself from calls from unknown numbers and generally unwanted calls and messages. Thanks to "Siri Intelligence", iOS can also filter out incoming calls from unknown people. You can find out how it all works here. (Photo by Thapana_Studio / Bigstockphoto)
