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Claim
Warning by BBC Radio against opening a link titled “WhatsApp Gold” or videos titled “Martinelli” & “Dance of the Pope”
Fact
Hoax messages that are intended to be malware distribution tools
A message, purportedly from BBC Radio, warning users against opening videos that are titled “Martinelli” and “Dance of the Pope” or opening links that promise an upgrade to “Whatsapp Gold” service, has gone viral on the messenger platform.
The viral “warning” states that these videos and links are intended to be malwares and urge users to forward the warning to others. Newschecker received this claim on our Whatsapp tipline (9999499044), too, requesting it to be fact-checked.
Newschecker noticed that the warning message had several grammatical errors, along with phrases like “Fwd this msg to as many as you can”, which seemed unlike the language BBC Radio would use in a notice, raising our doubts.
We then ran a keyword search for “BBC Radio, MartinellI, Whatsapp Gold”, which did not show any relevant BBC report, but led us to this Forbes report, dated March 26, 2020, calling out the message as a hoax when it went viral back then.
The report stated, “The current WhatsApp hoax message, which claims the warning was announced on BBC news, urges people not to click on a message to update to WhatsApp Gold. It also then requests the recipient to inform all their contacts not to open a video that is bizarrely called “Dance of the Pope” as it’s malware that will format their smartphone. Another variation of the same hoax warns readers not to open a video called “Martinelli” as doing so ‘hacks your phone and nothing will fix it”, indicating that the viral message is a hoax on the same lines. The report quoted an information security veteran, Graham Cluley, who dismissed the viral message as fake, saying,”There’s no mention of what mobile operating system the malware runs on. There’s no link to the BBC News report which it is claimed warned about the virus.”
The report stated that the viral message was meant to be a malware distribution tool — “The more people pass the hoax upgrade message warning on to others, the more likely it is that the warning itself will include a link to real malware.”
A News18 report, dated March 27, 2020, stated that the Martinelli hoax WhatsApp message had first appeared back in 2016. “Watch out for any WhatsApp invitation that wants you to upgrade to WhatsApp Gold. The way this worked is that if you accept the invite, you would then be asked to click a download link, which takes this as an invitation to install malware on their device. Of course, you wouldn’t immediately realise that malware is being installed on your phone. And no, there has never been a special WhatsApp Gold edition and it is unlikely there will ever be one,” read the report. Similar articles can be seen here and here.
The articles reiterated that Whatsapp updates are available only through App Store for iPhones and Play Store for Android Phones. “Any update available outside the platforms can contain malware and potentially harm your device,” read an HT report.
We also came across another report dated September 6, 2022, by Christopher Boyd, lead malware intelligence analyst, stating that the Martinelli-Whatsapp Gold-Pope dance hoax has been repackaged several times since at least 2017. The article featured a tweet by the Spanish Police Department, dated July 29, 2017, warning against the Martinelli hoax. “This message circulating via WhatsApp about the Martinelli video is fake. Stop sharing it,” the tweet read.
UPDATE: We reached out to Whatsapp, where a spokesperson said, “Both of these are false. WhatsApp Gold is a long-running hoax, as is Martinelli.”
A viral Whatsapp message warning people against upgrading to Whatsapp Gold, clicking on videos titled “Martinelli” and “Dance of the Pope”, was found to be an old hoax, intended to spread malware, dating back to 2016.
Sources
Forbes report, March 26, 2020
News18 report, March 27, 2020
Malware bytes blog, September 6, 2022
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