How to spot a social media hoax
Well, well, well, if it isn’t the WhatsApp Gold/’martinelli’ video scam, back again, as half-bunk and half-real-threat as ever.
Excellent! It’s a great opportunity to offer some advice on pulling the rug out from under these and other scammers. For the dissection of Gold/martinelli, read on. For some advice to forward to the prey of the scammers, jump on further down!
The current bunk
As Snopes tells it, the WhatsApp Gold scam messages have been kicking around since at least 2016 in varyingly worded messages, claiming that some new “premium service” would get users extra goodies, such as video calling and new emojis.
Hey Finally Secret WhatsApp golden version has been leaked, This version is used only by big celebrities. Now we can use it too.
Users who clicked on the link got no goodies. They got baddies, in the form of a malware-rigged, non-WhatsApp website. The malware, nicknamed WhatsApp Gold, was designed to break into phones and steal victims’ messages and other private data.
Bad enough, eh? Well, the mad cyber scientists decided to make it a bit more poisonous when they wrapped a true warning about the real WhatsApp Gold malware around a bogus warning about a fictional video called martinelli.
This scam burrito has been getting passed around since at least mid-2017, picking up only minor word swaps but still refusing to unglue its death-grip on arbitrary, proofreader-taunting, inappropriate spaces around punctuation.
The version we saw in November:
If you know anyone using WhatsApp you might pass on this. An IT colleague has advised that a video comes out tomorrow from WhatsApp called martinelli do not open it , it hacks your phone and nothing will fix it. Spread the word. If you receive a message to update the Whatsapp to Whatsapp Gold, do not click !!!!!
Now said on the news this virus is difficult and severePass it on to all
According to multiple news outlets, that sage, fictional “IT colleague” is back again, once again babbling about this equally fictional martinelli video.