According to CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp messenger Kum Yang, the number of monthly active users messaging application mark of 800 million people in April 2015.
Present owner (in February 2014 the company was bought by Facebook) says the number of WhatsApp users will exceed 1 billion. In the last few days WhatsApp users actively send each other messages that the service will soon be paid.
To use free messenger and become a frequent user, it is necessary to send a warning to ten people from your contact list. “Jim Balsamic, CEO WhatsApp” is mentioned as the author of the message. Users obtain such messages: "Please DO NOT ignore this message or your account will be deleted within the next 48 hours. If you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a charge of 25.00 will be added to your monthly bill. Thank you for your cooperation with us, from the Whatsapp team.”
In summer 2013 the unknown authors claimed that users would have to pay 0.01 euros for each new message. In fact, WhatsApp is free to download and try out for twelve months. After that first year you can extend your subscription for 99 cents per year and you may read it on WhatsApp official website.
ESET experts recommended to ignore spam and stop wasting time on redirecting it. The current spam isn’t malicious and it will only lead to traffic flow, but such messages may have malicious links in future. In January, AdaptiveMobile tracked an increase of spam complexity on messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, in the United States, Europe and India, and expected these attacks to continue through 2015.
Popular messengers like WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram and similar sometimes overwhelm users with spam and it’s not because of spyware programs that track your correspondence in free messengers. The reason is in logic and design of these messaging apps. Have you ever got phone calls from strangers with “profitable offer”? Have you ever got any advertising messages from taxi services, shops, etc.? It not because you give your phone number to all the services, it’s because robots and spammers generate phone numbers randomly.
The same goes with above mentioned messengers. Bots generate bulk messaging and send spam to phone numbers. If the owner of any number is registered in any smart messenger, he will receive the message, despite the fact that the sender is not in the contact list of the recipient. Thus we have massive spam attacks.
SafeUM secure messenger is a solution. SafeUM is a spam free zone: to receive any message, you have to authorize the sender and accept the invite. If the user whom you added to your contact list starts sending spam, just block him or simply delete from your SafeUM contacts list.
