WhatsApp scam warning.
I don't usually post these things because they often turn out to be hoaxes, but in this case it appears to be genuine. And I'm sure members here are savvy about these things, but I decided to post this warning anyway.
Last night I got an invitation on WhatsApp to join a community group called William Smith Study Club. As I’d never heard of it I did a search for it and that showed lots of press and police reports that there are scams going around with these invitations and they've been in circulation for some time. The press reports say that if you join the group you’ll receive an invitation from the group moderator to join one of the discussion chats, but they’ll send you a code that you need to type in to join it. This will allow them to take control of your phone and then send invitations to all your WhatsApp contacts to scam them as well and you'll also be locked out of your own phone.
When I went back to WhatsApp to decline the request I found that I'd automatically been added to the community and a couple of individual chats within it, so I had to exit from the community and delete the chats.
Attachment:
WhatsApp Scam Community.jpg
So, if you receive an unsolicited invitation to join some kind of discussion group, or just an unexpected friend request just click on the ‘Exit Group,’ button or the ‘decline request’ button so that you don’t join the group or accept the friend request. If you ever get any invitation to join a group in ANY app in which they send you a code to join, just delete the invitation and NEVER enter a code to accept any kind of invitation for anything that you haven’t requested.
I know there have been a lot of hoax messages circulated in the past, so if you're in any doubt that this might be a hoax please do your own search for William Smith Study Group and you'll see how widely this has been reported.