Someone is reportedly selling mobile phone numbers of nearly 500 million users of the WhatsApp app.
On November 16, a user posted an ad on a well-known hacking forum, claiming to sell a 2022 database of 487 million mobile phone numbers of WhatsApp users.
The dataset reportedly contains user data from 84 countries. For example, there are telephone numbers belonging to citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), Turkey (20 million), but also Greece ( 617.722).
The data set for sale is also said to have almost 10 million Russians, 32 million US users and over 11 million phone numbers of UK citizens.
The malicious user he told Cybernews that he is selling all of the US data for $7.000, for the UK, he is asking $2.500 and for Germany, $2.000.
Such information is mainly used by attackers for smishing and vishing attacks, so we recommend users to be careful about any calls from unknown numbers, spam calls and messages.
WhatsApp is reported to have more than two billion monthly active users worldwide.
Upon request, the database vendor shared a sample of the data with Cybernews researchers. There were 1097 UK and 817 US user numbers in the sample.
Cybernews researched the numbers and was able to confirm that all of them were active users of the WhatsApp app.
