The scam begins with a screenshot. Someone saves your WhatsApp profile picture, opens a new account with a fresh SIM, sets your photo and your name, and messages your contacts: “new number, in trouble, send 5,000 taka by bKash.” It works because the face is right. In March WhatsApp shut the first step on Android — the profile photo simply cannot be captured — and, according to WABetaInfo, the same block is now in testing for iPhone.
What the block does
In iOS beta version 24.10.10.70, opening another user’s profile picture and pressing the screenshot buttons produces a pop-up saying the app does not allow it, and the saved image is black. It uses the same mechanism that stops screenshots of view-once photos and of banking apps. There is no date for the public release; WhatsApp’s beta features usually reach everyone within a few weeks to a couple of months.
What it cannot stop
Honesty about the limits: a second phone pointed at the screen defeats it in one second, and a picture already copied last year is not recalled. The block raises the effort for the casual cloner — the person who runs the scam from a single phone in an afternoon — and does nothing against the organised ones. It also does not stop screenshots of your chats, which have never been protected and are not planned to be.
Why Bangladesh in particular
The impersonation scam is a staple of Bangladeshi police complaints: the “relative abroad who lost his wallet”, the “boss who needs a gift card”, the “daughter with a new number”. Nearly all of them rely on a stolen profile photo and a plausible name, sent to contacts who trust the face more than the number. Any friction in that pipeline reduces victims.
The two settings that matter more
- Settings → Privacy → Profile photo → My contacts. Strangers, including scammers scanning numbers, then see no photo at all. This is the single most effective step and has been available for years.
- Settings → Account → Two-step verification. A PIN that stops your own account being hijacked onto another phone — the other common route to impersonation.
And a rule for the family group: a new number asking for money is a phone call first, always, no matter whose face is on it.
Source: India Today, via Prothom Alo.
