Scam messages on social apps targeting Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants are on the rise. Here are ways to avoid them.
about a website that was pretending to be them and was asking for donations to “continue their efforts.”
Orellana received this message, in Spanish that had spelling and syntax errors, from her friend at the beginning of October. When she saw it, she thought she qualified, as she had been vaccinated earlier in the summer. She needed the assistance because she had missed out on the EWF.“At the beginning I thought it was another stimulus program. I googled it and the name came up, so I assumed it was real. As I started to put in my information, they asked me to share the link with 10 other people.
“The safety and security of our users and their personal messages is really important to us, which is why we protect them with end-to-end encryption,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said to Documented. “However, just like regular SMS or phone calls, it’s possible for other WhatsApp users who have your phone number to contact you."collected by the Federal and Trade Commission , whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil U.S.
Suárez also said that she advised the other members not to interact with the message and not to spread it. She said that the person who sent it apologized, adding that she had sent it in good faith.Documented and Telemundo News looked into at least 25 different messages, sent multiple times, since the beginning of the pandemic. All of the messages offered help to immigrants and linked to a webpage that had ads embedded.
The team at Documented and Telemundo were able to confirm that sometimes the scammers intended to steal the WhatsApp accounts associated with the number submitted in the forms.