An app posing as WhatsApp is circulating on Google Play and has already passed 500,000 installs. It is also called “WhatsApp Messenger”, and it uses the genuine app’s icon, screenshots and description, but it does not belong to Meta. According to reports published between 16 and 17 October, it could still be downloaded at the time those pieces went out.
What was found
The alert started with a Reddit user who, while searching for WhatsApp on the Play Store, came across the clone. Android Authority picked up the story and other outlets followed.
The fake’s listing has a few recurring features:
- the developer appears as “Agment Assets sallu”, an account that has not published any other app;
- according to Google Play, the app was published about a month ago, so in September;
- there are no user ratings;
- for some users it appeared as a sponsored result when searching for WhatsApp.
Accounts differ somewhat on its visibility in ads: in the test that prompted the report, the official app still came up first, both on a phone and on the web. So not everyone saw the clone in the same way.
Why it has no reviews
The absence of public reviews is one of the more curious details. Several outlets suggest the developer is using Google Play’s Early Access programme, which allows ratings to be kept hidden from the public. Bitdefender, cited by SammyGuru, notes that apps in this programme have no visible reviews, which makes it harder to realise something is wrong before installing them. This is a hypothesis: Google has not commented.
Is it malware?
For now, nobody knows. The sources are cautious: it has not been established what the app actually does, or what data it collects. Some outlets point out that clones of this kind are usually used to steal passwords, banking credentials, files and photos, but that is a general risk, not behaviour documented in this specific case.
There is also a recent precedent. A few days ago a fake Google Chrome passed 100,000 downloads, driven by advertising campaigns, before Google removed it. There is no sign yet that the fake WhatsApp has been taken down, and Google has not said whether it will step in.
How to recognise the real app
The comparison with the original is stark, and a glance at the listing is enough:
- the genuine app is published by WhatsApp LLC;
- it has over 10 billion downloads and hundreds of millions of reviews;
- the clone has half a million installs and no ratings.
An app that carries the WhatsApp name but comes from another developer should be ignored, wherever it appears in the results.
What to do
If you installed WhatsApp from an ad or from a search result you don’t remember clearly, open the app’s information and check who the publisher is. If it isn’t WhatsApp LLC, uninstall it straight away and switch to the official app, downloading it from the WhatsApp website or from the Play Store listing reached without going through ads. Then change any passwords you may have entered, and keep an eye on your bank account if you supplied payment details.
What we think
What stands out is not so much the half a million downloads as the fact that a listing with no reviews and no history managed to compete with the world’s most widely used messaging app. People searching for WhatsApp on the Play Store already have the app in mind and tend to trust the first result: that is exactly the moment scammers aim for.
Google already has tools to protect users, such as the scam protection in Messages we covered in Google Messages gets advanced scam protection, but the store remains the weak point when a listing copies the original perfectly. It would make sense for the Play Store to highlight the official publisher and make apps without ratings more visible, especially when the name matches that of a very famous brand. In the meantime, checking the publisher before tapping “Install” remains the most effective defence, and it costs nothing.
Written by the SpazioiTech newsroom with the help of AI tools, from facts verified across at least two independent outlets, and checked before publication. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.
Translated from the Italian original. Read in Italian
