Over 3 Million Belgian WhatsApp Numbers For Sale After Huge Leak | Instagram VTM News

The specialist Cybernews site examined the data and checked whether the US and UK numbers from the leak matched the WhatsApp users, which is correct. In total, this concerns 487 million numbers, while WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users worldwide.

Also in our country they do not seem to be of interest to all users. For example, there are 3.1 million Belgian numbers in the database, while WhatsApp is estimated to have more than 5 million mobile phones in Belgium. The data dump file appears to only contain phone numbers and no other data, such as names or other metadata.

Cybernews believes the data was collected through scraping, where someone can extract information from profiles or websites. It is not clear if this is an old or a new leak. The hacker announced the existence of the database in a forum, while communicating with him or her via Telegram.

It is not known if there are already buyers of the database. For American numbers, for example, the provider asks for $ 7,000 (more than 6,700 euros).

According to RTL Info, WhatsApp users in 84 countries have been affected. Most of the data (45 million figures) comes from Egypt, followed by Italy with 35 million data. Internet experts warn that the number of WhatsApp phishing attempts may now increase. Because anyone who buys this data set can easily pretend to be someone they know and try to extort money.

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, has not yet communicated about the leaked data.

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