Numbers of almost 500 million WhatsApp users leaked to the Network - including 10 million Russian

On November 16, a message appeared on a popular hacker forum about the sale of a base with phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users from 84 countries. This is almost a quarter of the active users of the messenger - for 2022, the WhatsApp audience is estimated at 2 billion people.

At the request of journalists from cybernews the seller provided a sample database containing 1097 British and 817 US numbers. The check confirmed that all of them are indeed registered with WhatsApp.

The seller claims to have used its own methods to collect data and can guarantee that all numbers belong to active WhatsApp users as of 2022. This is probably not the result of a leak in the messenger database, but parsing data, which violates the rules for using the messenger.

Cybernews also provides a breakdown of the number of rooms in the database, which is described in the original sale announcement:

The leaked number base can be used for marketing or fraudulent purposes, as well as to block other people's WhatsApp accounts after many unsuccessful login attempts.