How do you know if you are part of the million people who downloaded a fake version of WHATSAPP?

Do you get annoying advertising ads when you want to open WhatsApp to send a message or when you want to go to greet in a group?

Well, you could be one of the million people who downloaded a fake version of the popular instant messaging application that was available on the Android platform in recent weeks.

According to the information provided by the application before it was removed from the Google store for the Android system (Play store), the fake WhatsApp had been downloaded nearly a million times.

But how can you recognize it? Basically because you leave advertisements to download other applications.

According to several users of the Reddit platform, which brought the case to the attention, this version is what is known as an "ad-loaded wrapper" (an advertisement facilitator), what the real version of WHATSAPP does not do.

So far the regions where the application was discharged and which countries were the hardest hit are unknown.

If you become one of the people affected, you must delete the fake application and download a new one.

The deception

The truth is that, even though it was fake, the parallel version of WhatsApp looked quite similar to the original in the Google App Store, which provides the Android platform.

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That's what the real application looks like. The scammers managed to copy every detail.

The fraudulent developers had made the product have the same logo and even was associated with a developer with the same name: "WhatsApp Inc".

This was achieved by replacing, when they programmed the thymus, the space between the two words with a special character that simulated a space.

A subtle difference that is almost impossible to detect by an average user of Google Play Store.

The only obvious disparity that the user could detect before downloading the app was in the small letter: below, when the application properties were listed in a more detailed way, the developer now did show his real name.

WHATSAPP was launched in 2009 and was later purchased by Facebook for US $19,000 million. It is one of the most used applications in the world, with about 1 billion downloads.

But beyond the already solved deception, what worries many users is that this is not the first time that Google has to clean applications from its store.

In 2015, for example, the technological giant had to block an application that said it was used to monitor the battery and what it actually did was to send text messages to sites that charged high sums of money to the user of the phone.