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WhatsApp for PC – a popular Facebook scam in Spain

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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Facebook ads are still allowing scams, at least in some languages. Ads have been appearing in Spanish users feeds that offer ‘WhatsApp for PC’. It’s a popular search term and a program that many people would like, but WhatsApp for PC doesn’t exist.

WhatsApp for PC – a popular Facebook scam in Spain

The ‘suggested post’ that’s appearing in Spanish news feeds.

Unlike similar apps Viber and LINE, WhatsApp uses your phone number as your account. It only works with phones, and there’s no tablet or desktop version. It’s possible to run WhatsApp for Android on your PC using the Bluestacks emulator, but you still need a phone number to associate with it.

The scam, that is advertised on Facebook as WhatsApp for Computer (WhatsApp para Ordenador), requires you to enter your ‘phone number and reply to a premium SMS that charges 1.5 euros for activation and a further 1.45 euros for each message you receive. That’s an expensive way to use Bluestacks, which is completely free (and you can download it from Softonic).

Various similar pages exist on Facebook, like WhatsApp for iPad, and WhatsApp for PC, and they all lead to scam pages that ask for money for an app that doesn’t exist. It’s important to be wary on Facebook that there are scams out there, and people who want to take advantage of wishful thinking (like ‘I wish I had WhatsApp on my PC’).

It’s not clear that Facebook deals with these scam artists unless there are complaints logged against them.

[UPDATE: WhatsApp for PC has finally been released in 2016!]

[Source: adslzone]

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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