In addition, to prevent your WhatsApp account from being compromised, members of the public are advised to take the following precautions: Purchase only from authorised sellers or reputable sources, especially for high-value items.
![whatsapp scamming whatsapp scamming](https://i1.wp.com/yardhype.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/scamming.jpg)
Victims only discovered that they had been scammed when they did not receive the gold bars, or when they realised that their friends’ WhatsApp accounts had been hacked after contacting their friends who did not turn up to complete the transaction. In some cases, victims were told to meet up with the scammers to collect the gold bars. The scammers would provide a fake invoice purportedly issued by the Singapore Customs and instruct the victims to transfer the payment for the gold bars to various bank accounts provided. Scammers would explain that the gold bars were sold cheaply as these gold bars had been seized by the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority or Singapore Customs and were being auctioned off. These scammers would then ask if the victims would like to purchase gold bars at a price that was 30% below the market rate. In these cases, the scammers leveraged compromised WhatsApp accounts belonging to the victims’ friends to communicate with the victims. The Police would like to alert members of the public to a new variant of scam, where scammers are using compromised WhatsApp accounts belonging to victims’ friends to promote the sale of gold bars.
![whatsapp scamming whatsapp scamming](https://static.mothership.sg/1/2021/05/Whatsapp-scam-oxygen-india.png)