How to know if you are being extorted on WhatsApp or Social Networks and what to do

Are they really extorting you or is it a lie? Some tips to avoid extortion

It is not easy to know if they are extorting you or just playing with the information you have in your networks.

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It was to be expected that bad habits, practices, extortion and scams would reach applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. Many are already present but now many extortionists use the popular WhatsApp messaging application to get money. Everything virtual is changing personal, social and business relationships at dizzying rates.

Maybe your business or way of communicating is one day one way and the next day it has changed. Scammers have also stepped up in this regard and through suggestive messages such as “I want to meet you”, contests, discounts or false promises to “spy on your partner’s conversations on WhatsApp” they manage to capture many unsuspecting people.

Police tips to avoid extortion

The worrying thing is that all these practices go faster than the ability to be sanctioned, executed or prevented.so we must be cautious before any offer of these, nobody offers hard four pesetas.

According to the National Police Inspector, Head of the Network Group of the Technological Investigation Unit, every day new cases and types of fraud arrive at her office. She investigates and studies new types of crimes on the Internet and on her Twitter account she helps us prevent them.

Thus, some people suffer extortion through WhatsApp with messages such as “watch out for the consequences”, “I know where you live”, “I know your family” even warning that someone we know or close to has been kidnapped. Thus, the easiest thing in this panic situation is for many victims to end up paying and giving in to blackmail, which in most cases is false.

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What evidence can we collect against these extortionists who mainly use WhatsApp and Skype? Well, in many cases the number, the profile photo, the email and others are not sufficient or reliable to show who is behind the extortions.

How victims are chosen on WhatsApp and social networks

It is very easy to create a fake account on Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp and other social networks. Through these fake accounts, usually created on remote sites, extortionists aggregate victims and collect data on them to calculate their crime. So we must prevent and be very careful with the profiles that we accept as contact.

A Facebook group such as “How to find out someone else’s password”, “Easily earn money” and similar hooks easily attract many people. Once this type of criminal has the victims, little by little they gain trust of their followers through information of interest, tutorials and others that supposedly work but are actually false or false.

While he is gaining trust with his followers, he gets intimate with them through a message until he finally provides the phone number to contact via WhatsApp and send a few messages. The exchange of messages lasts for days, even weeks, waiting for the promises that have been made, generally money or passwords.

The instructions of the Head of Networks of the Silvia Barrera Technological Research Unit are clear, first of all Do not make it easy for these people, be cautious and not give information. If we put comments on our Facebook, or WhatsApp status that provide information such as “My sister is going to Finland”, “Look, I bought Mercedes”… All this is data that scammers can use to create a custom trap, since they could, for example, tell us “We have kidnapped your sister in Finland”.

The fact is that they have gained our trust little by little, but what do we have of them? Your number? Your Facebook account? Your email? All susceptible to being falsified. They for their part threaten from remote sites with “I’ll find you”, “face the consequences”, “watch your back”, and in the event that we pay they will probably come back for more money.

Thus, the threats and extortions continue over time and according to the police they rarely stop before they are captured by the agents themselves, but by then we will have already paid large amounts of money.

Be careful with the data you publish on the Internet

If you are showing off your iPhone, your trips, your car… in short If you presume to have money, you are the perfect target for this type of extortion and crime.. So if you are looking for shady deals like earning money easily, hacking email accounts or reading someone else’s WhatsApp, those who offer it to you will also be shady people.

If these businesses were profitable, if making money were so easy, in short, if these offers were real, they would not offer it to you, much less publicly, so be careful with the hard ones at four pesetas because they are probably a lie. To avoid this, we recommend our advice on .

Finally it is recommended that If we are facing a similar case, we must report it to the police since they cannot and do not want to hurt you, they just want to get your money quickly and easily.

And what measures do you take to avoid extortionists on Facebook, WhatsApp and the Internet? have you suffered something like this? We await your response in the comments.

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