This Friday, we learned that Whatsapp had recently suffered a huge data theft, which implies that around 487 million mobile phone numbers are now for sale on the dark web, including 3.1 million Belgian numbers.
“Virtually all users in Belgium,” according to Data News data journalist Pieterjan Van Leemputten, who reminds users to be extra vigilant against phishing attempts.
“If you can steal such a data set, you can even more easily pretend to be a friend or a daughter of someone to get money from that person. It won’t always work, but if you try to scam 1,000 people like this, two will fall for it. And that’s all they need,” he concludes.
For his part, Olivier Bogaert explains that this would above all be an attempt at fraud. “I think that with the context that has been described to us here, with this large number of telephone numbers, it is an attempt at scam,” the cybersecurity expert told RTL Info. “It’s playing on the identity theft of our contacts: I have a friend on Whatsapp, I get a message from him, it’s his number since he’s in my contact list, so no worries. , I follow up. Obviously, the idea here is to be able to make money. »