Ouagadougou: The Central Brigade for the Fight Against Cybercrime (BCLCC) issued an alert on Wednesday, in response to a resurgence of WhatsApp account hacking cases, recorded by its Technical Assistance and Technological Monitoring Service.

According to Burkina Information Agency, malicious individuals are targeting internet users by impersonating religious figures or exploiting previously hacked Facebook accounts, with the aim of compromising WhatsApp accounts and defrauding the victims' relatives and contacts.

The modus operandi involves contacting victims from spoofed or hacked accounts, offering them supposed membership in WhatsApp groups dedicated to prayer or religious activities. Under this pretext, the cybercriminals ask victims to provide their WhatsApp phone numbers.

Once they obtain these numbers, the perpetrators attempt to create a new WhatsApp account in the victims' names. The confirmation code automatically sent by the application is then requested by the cybercriminals, who fraudulently present themselves as religious leaders, claiming that this code is necessary to finalize the user's integration into the group.

Transmitting this code allows scammers to take complete control of the victim's WhatsApp account. The hacked accounts are then used to solicit money from contacts under various false pretenses, including health or humanitarian emergencies.

Faced with this threat, the BCLCC is calling on the public to be more vigilant. It recommends never sharing your WhatsApp verification code with anyone and always enabling two-factor authentication on the app.

The Brigade also invites anyone who is a victim or witness of a suspicious attempt to make an immediate report via the official Alerte-BCLCC platform.