There was a time when WhatsApp wasn’t free and some users of the popular service are being warned they may soon have to start paying again.
A message has begun doing the rounds which suggests fans of the app must begin paying to keep using it.
The note states: “Your subscription has expired. To Verify your account and purchase a lifetime subscription for just 0.99 GBP simply tap on this link.”
Clearly 99p doesn’t sound very much but users are being warned NOT to click on the link provided in the message.
Since 2016 WhatsApp has scrapped all fees with the company saying: “We’re happy to announce that WhatsApp will no longer charge subscription fees.
“For many years, we’ve asked some people to pay a fee for using WhatsApp after their first year.
“As we’ve grown, we’ve found that this approach hasn’t worked well.
“WhatsApp will no longer charge you for our service.”
The message, that is landing in inboxes across the country about the 99p charge, is clearly a fake with the link likely to take users to scam or malicious website.
This isn’t the first time a message about WhatsApp charging users had flooded the web.
Last year the service was hit by two similar attacks which saw those with a WhatsApp account being warned they would soon have pay.
Another message also tried to tricked users into installing malicious software on their devices.
The scam tricked fans of the popular service by suggesting a range of new customisable colours were available to them.
Encouraging users to share the message with 12 friend to verify their accounts and activate the feature, the message then pushed users to download a Chrome plug in that made them vulnerable to nasty adware.
New Year’s Eve 2017 saw WhatsApp users send a mammoth 75 billion messages across the service.
That number eclipses any other day in its history with the previous record of 65 million on New Year’s Eve 2016 well and truly smashed.
WhatsApp says that of the 75 billion messages sent, 13 billion were photos and five billion included videos.
WhatsApp users could have boosted this number even further if an outage hadn’t hit the service on New Year’s Eve.
The app was down for around an two hours at its busiest time leaving many unable to send or receive messages.
According to website outage monitor, Down Detector, the issues hit users across the globe with Europe the worst affected.