New WhatsApp Scams and How to Keep the People You Love Safe

One morning this May, a mother in Martinez, California picked up an unknown number and heard her daughter sobbing — panicked, apologizing, asking for help. The voice was unmistakably her daughter's, but the kidnapping wasn’t real. Scammers had cloned the young woman's voice from a few seconds of audio, and before the mother called the real daughter at work, she had wired $5,400 to Mexico.

For years, the advice for a call like that had been to hang up and call your kid directly. But AI voice tools now cost less than a streaming subscription and need only a few seconds of social media audio to copy a voice, so the reassuring call-back is moot.

A lot of this begins on WhatsApp. It's encrypted, it costs nothing, and nearly three billion people use it, which is why Meta removed 6.8 million accounts tied to organized scam centers in the first half of last year alone. Here are the WhatsApp scams worth knowing this year, ordered by how often they're reaching people right now, plus the one habit that still works when a familiar voice no longer proves anything: a family code word.

1. The "Hi Mom" text scam

Most impersonation scams look like an ordinary text from an unknown number: "Hi Mom, I dropped my phone in the sink, this is my new number." The plainness of these texts is deliberate. The scammer is hoping to move you onto a number they control and then create urgency with, say, a locked bank account or a payment only you can make.

Cheap AI tools can rebuild your child's voice from a short clip lifted off Instagram or TikTok. So when you do the smart thing and call to check, your kid picks up crying. Investigators at Operation Shamrock, who track these cases, call the surge a "scamdemic" and expect it to worsen as the AI tools get better.

How to protect yourself: Agree on a family code word now, while nothing is wrong, and ask for it any time money or a new number comes up. Pick a word your family would never post online. If the caller dodges the question or pushes you toward a payment, treat it as fraud and hang up.

Related: Why Am I Getting So Many Spam Calls? →

2. Pig butchering scams

"Hi David, still on for golf Saturday?" You reply that they have the wrong number. They thank you, apologize, and somehow the conversation keeps going. Weeks later, your new, unexpected WhatsApp friend mentions how well they're doing in crypto and offers to show you how.

That's how most pig butchering scams begin. Through one FBI effort called Operation Level Up, the bureau says it reached nearly 9,000 U.S. victims and headed off an estimated $562 million in losses as of April 2026. The dashboard that shows your balance climbing is fake and it only exists to keep you adding money until you try to withdraw and can't.

How to protect yourself: A stranger who texts the wrong number and then steers the talk toward investing is following a script. Don't let the chat move to a special trading app, and treat anyone who needs a fee to release your own money as a scam.

Related: How To Remove a Hacker From Your Smartphone →

3. Pump and dump investment groups

One day you're added to a WhatsApp group of investors trading screenshots of their gains, with a generous analyst running the room. The tips look real and your first small trade might even pay out. Then the group pushes everyone into a thinly traded stock or coin, and the price collapses with your money inside it.

This one has caught the attention of state prosecutors. This year, the attorneys general of New York, California, Maryland, Washington, and Michigan each warned residents about investment scams running on Meta's apps. The FTC counted $2.1 billion lost in 2025 to scams that started on social media, and $425 million of it began on WhatsApp.

How to protect yourself: No real advisor recruits strangers through a group chat. Leave any group you didn't ask to join, and turn on WhatsApp's privacy setting that stops unknown accounts from adding you.

Related: How To Spot Fake Apps: App Size, Permissions, Source →

4. Task scams

A recruiter you never contacted offers flexible hours and good money, hires you within minutes, and points you to a dashboard where you rate products and fill out surveys. Thirty or forty dollars arrives and you're sold.

Then the work stops paying. To unlock the next set of tasks, or to withdraw what the dashboard says you've earned, you have to deposit your own money first, often in crypto. The FTC warned in April that a job offer arriving by text is probably a scam. The FBI, which files these as work from home scams, finds them running out of the same compounds as pig butchering.

How to protect yourself: Real employers don't recruit by cold text, and no legitimate job asks you to pay before it pays you. If a dashboard is showing earnings you can't withdraw, the earnings were never there.

5. Account takeover scams

This scam arrives as a warning about suspicious activity on your account, or as a note from a friend saying they sent you a code by mistake. It tends to end in one of two ways. You type the six-digit code into the chat, and whoever asked for it now owns your number.

Or you tap on a link or scan a QR code, which quietly attaches their device to your account and lets them read everything you send while nothing on your phone looks wrong.

The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a warning about this scam in March, after Russian intelligence operatives used it to break into thousands of accounts belonging to U.S. officials, military personnel, and journalists. Those campaigns went after people trained to recognize phishing and it worked anyway.

How to protect yourself: Never type a verification code into a chat, even one from someone you know. A stolen account still shows their name and photo. Turn on two-step verification so a code alone isn't enough, and open Settings, then Linked Devices, and log out anything you don't recognize.

6. Prize and payment scams

Prizes don't usually require you to pay to collect. Whatever the message says you've won, a lottery you never entered or a gift card from a brand you've never shopped with, you have to send money before any money comes back.

The fee has a different name each time and it could be processing charges, unpaid taxes, customs. Or they ask for the numbers off the back of a gift card. The FTC has published two alerts on this since January. One says anyone who calls to tell you you've won a prize is a scammer. The other is titled "No, that's not your boss asking you to buy gift cards.”

How to protect yourself: You never pay to receive money. Real giveaways from companies you use live on their own websites. And a gift card is a payment method, so anyone who asks for one is asking you to pay them.

7. Romance scams

When a match suggests moving the conversation over to WhatsApp, it sounds like a small step. The FBI, though, counts that request among the signs you're being scammed.

The conversation moves over to WhatsApp, and for weeks it's an ordinary romance. Good morning texts, photos, plans to meet that never quite come together. Nobody mentions money. Then they mention the trading platform that's been good to them, and offer to show you how it works.

One of the signs the bureau lists has nothing to do with money at all. It's whether the person has asked you to limit contact with your family or your financial advisor.

How to protect yourself: Someone who won't video call, or who moves you off the app where you met, is hiding something. A person who cares about you doesn't need you to invest in anything. And nobody real asks you to stop talking to your family.

How to stay safe on WhatsApp

• Agree on a family code word. Pick something nobody would post online, and make sure the youngest person who might get a frightening call knows it too. A cloned voice can copy everything about your daughter except a word she's never said online.
• Never share a code you didn't ask for. Don't give out a PIN or a two-factor code for anything you didn't start yourself.
• Verify on a number you already have. Both the FBI and CISA tell people to reach the sender another way before sharing anything. Use the contact in your phone, never the number in the message.
• Remember that support will never message you. Legitimate app support doesn't ask for verification codes and doesn't send links to restore your account. If you need help, open the official site yourself.
• Check who's actually in your group chats. Scanning participant lists for impostor accounts. It's how a room of strangers gets dressed up to look like a room of friends.
• Turn on two-step verification, and check your linked devices. A PIN means a stolen six-digit code isn't enough to take over your WhatsApp. In Settings, open Linked Devices and remove anything you don't recognize.
• Never pay to get your money back. Anyone promising to recover funds you've already lost is running the second half of the same scam.
• Report it in three places. On iPhone, open the chat, tap the contact's name, then Report. On Android, open the chat and tap the three-dot menu, then Report. File with the FBI at ic3.gov. Report the fraud to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. If you bought gift cards, call the card company first, because some funds can still be frozen.

And if you’re worried that you may have fallen victim to a scam, take advantage of Aura’s financial fraud protection and credit monitoring. Receive near-instant notifications about any suspicious changes to your credit or bank accounts.