Sooner or later you will end up falling for a fraudulent link that you receive via SMS, WhatsApp, email or any other means. Don’t panic, we’ll tell you What you can do if you have opened a fraudulent link on your Android phone, depending on what your exact situation is.
As anti-spam protection on our mobile phones improves, scammers are using increasingly elaborate methods to get you their malicious messages look realIf you have fallen into one of them, it is not the end of the world, although it depends a lot on what you have done after clicking on the link.
If you have not interacted with the link
Example of two malicious links in SMS messages
The vast majority of fake websites that reach us in SMS, WhatsApp and similar messages are simply phishing, pretending to be the official page of an entity when they are not. This means that There’s no harm in just opening them. It’s not going to magically steal your data or destroy your phone: this would only be possible if there was a major security flaw in your browser and Android version, and that’s not the goal of these types of messages. The goal is to make you believe that the website is real and interact with it.
So, if you simply opened the website and saw that it was a suspicious clone of your bank’s website, the post office website, or to pay an imaginary fine, Closing it is more than enough.
If you entered personal data
Many of these malicious links want to obtain your personal dataespecially if they are bank credentials. Anything you have entered on the malicious website should be considered to have fallen into the wrong hands and you will therefore need to take appropriate measures to minimize possible damage.
If you entered the bank credentialsnotifying your bank and changing them should be your priority, as well as checking if there has been any movement in your account. If you entered any type of username and password, it is best to change your password in all the services where you use it.
If you have paid or made a transfer
The worst thing that can happen to you is that you have paid something on the malicious website, as it will be difficult for you to recover it. If you made the payment by entering data such as your card number, then you can consider that these data are also in the hands of the criminals. Call your bank to cancel the card as soon as possible and comment on the situation.
You should also go to the police. file a complaintwhich you will need to try to get the bank to return the money you obtained from a phishing scam.
If you downloaded and installed something
Malicious websites have limits on what they can achieve, so it is common for you are invited to install a malicious application on mobile. These applications, with the appropriate permissions, can do more harm than the website itself, as they can intercept verification codes that arrive by SMS.
If you’ve only downloaded the app, or installed it and never opened it, then no problem: just uninstall it and that’s it. If you opened it, then the issue is more complicated because you can’t be sure what it did after opening it. The most sensible thing to do is Change your main passwordsuninstall the application and, in the worst case, restore the mobile.
In all cases
Whether you opened the link or not, one thing you can do is report the message and to the person who sent it to you in the application in which you received it. All applications such as Google Messages or WhatsApp have an option to report malicious messages, which helps the antispam system detect them and prevent them from being sent to other people.