Criminals might use ‘GhostPairing’ to hijack your WhatsApp account – here’s how to stop them
A ghost that's easy to bust
· TechRadarNews By James Rogerson published 19 December 2025
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- A new WhatsApp scam called 'GhostPairing' has been discovered
- This tricks users into giving a criminal access to their account
- The attacker can then commit identity theft and scam others
There’s no shortage of ways that hackers and other criminals will attempt to gain access to online accounts, but now another has just been discovered, and this specifically relates to WhatsApp.
Gen Digital (via Bleeping Computer) has discovered a WhatsApp account takeover approach that it’s dubbing ‘GhostPairing’ – and when a criminal successfully carries this out, it gives them full access to your WhatsApp account, potentially without you even realizing. So it’s worth knowing what to look out for.
The attempt starts by the victim being sent a message from one of their contacts, generally saying something like “Hey, I just found your photo”, followed by a link. That link will appear with a Facebook-like preview, as you can see in the image below, but the link itself won’t actually take you to Facebook.
Instead, it will take you to a page hosted by the criminals that’s designed to look like Facebook, and will ask you to log in to your account before you can see the content.
That process will involve providing your phone number and then either scanning a QR code or entering a numeric code into WhatsApp, but in either case, what it’s actually doing is using WhatsApp’s device linking function to link the criminal’s device to your WhatsApp account.
During this process your WhatsApp account should alert you that another device is attempting to access to your account, which will hopefully be enough of a red flag for most people, but inevitably some will miss this.
Those who do follow the steps on the fake Facebook page will give the criminal full access to their WhatsApp account from a linked device – that includes conversation histories, shared media, and of course the ability to message a user’s contacts.
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