Cloaked Facebook Ads Hijack Business WhatsApp Number

A reddit report about a romance scam that cost someone Amount not specified. Learn how to avoid falling victim.

Managing ads for a legit SG-based client (not adult/dating related at all). We discovered fake "online dating" ads running under unrelated Page names, using a tracking redirect (looks like a rented cloaking service - clean domain at root, but a hashed subpath like /cf/r/ that only resolves to the scam content for targeted users, not reviewers/bots). The landing page/redirect eventually surfaces our client's real, publicly-listed WhatsApp number as the "contact," and now the client is getting inbound messages from confused/annoyed people looking for dating services. Number isn't leaked from our side - it's public on their Google Business Profile and website - so best guess is it got scraped and hardcoded into the scam funnel, possibly deliberately, to insulate the actual scammer's real contact channel from reports. Already reported the ad via Meta Ad Library. Questions for anyone who's seen this before: Is scraping a real business's public number into a wa dot me click to chat link a known scam pattern, or something else going on? Any luck getting Meta to actually act on these reports in a reasonable timeframe? Worth reporting to WhatsApp's abuse channel separately from the Ad Library report, or does one cover both? Happy to share more detail (redacted) if useful to others dealing with the same thing.

🛡️ How to Protect Yourself

1

Be cautious of people met online asking for money

2

Research the person's background and social media

3

Never send money to someone you haven't met in person

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