News
A WhatsApp message from your sister's number may not be her
Guardian News and Media traces a fake voting message, dubbed the ballerina scam, spreading via trusted contacts from the Netherlands to London.
Key facts
Message appears to come from a saved contact, such as a sibling Asks for a vote for a child's competition, with a QR code attached Scanning the code through WhatsApp hands the account to the sender Reported spreading through the Netherlands, Italy and south-east London
Reported by
Guardian News and MediaA text that looks like it came from a sibling's number is being used to take over WhatsApp accounts, and it has reached readers in the Netherlands, Italy and south-east London. As reported by Guardian News and Media, the message asks for a vote for a child in a competition, with a QR code to scan. If a message like this arrives, do not scan any code inside it, even if the sender's name looks right.
The writer Zoe Williams described getting the message from a contact saved as her sister, asking her to vote for a friend's daughter in a competition where the prize was money for the child's education. The wording was off in several ways: the greeting, the punctuation, a detail about the child's school that did not fit what she knew of the family. She noticed all of it and scanned the QR code anyway.
What the scam depends on
The message does not try to convince a stranger. It reaches someone who already knows the real sister, trusts the saved contact name, and wants to help with something small and ordinary: a vote. The request is light enough that checking it feels like overkill. That is the step the scam depends on, not a reader failing to spot inconsistencies, but a reader who spots them and acts anyway because the ask seems too minor to verify.
Once the code is scanned through WhatsApp, the account is linked to someone else's device. From there, the scam can read the contact list, read messages, delete them, and send the same request on to everyone saved in the phone. The account keeps the real person's name and photo throughout. A friend of the writer's reported a version of this reaching a reader in her own household, caught before the code was scanned.
The scam is being called the ballerina scam, and its origin is not known. It has been tracked moving from the Netherlands through Italy and into south-east London within weeks, carried entirely by WhatsApp contacts forwarding it to people who trust them.
What this means for detection
A message like this is built to pass the usual checks: right name, right contact entry, a request too small to seem worth a phone call to confirm. That gap, between a request feeling too minor to verify and a QR code being powerful enough to hand over an account, is the kind of pattern worth flagging before the scan happens rather than after.
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What to do
- Stop before scanning any QR code sent in a message, even from a known contact.
- Call the sender on a number you already have saved, not one in the message, to confirm it is really them.
- Do not reply to or forward the message if anything feels off.
- Report the message to WhatsApp if it turns out to be a scam.
