Meta-owned WhatsApp denies data leak of 487 million users and put on sale

Meta-owned WhatsApp on Monday denied that phone numbers of 487 million users have been stolen and put on sale on a “well-known” hacking community forum.

Cybernews first reported that the dataset allegedly contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries and phone numbers of over 32 million users from the US, 11 million from the UK, and 10 million from Russia.

“The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ from WhatsApp,” a company spokesperson told IANS.

The purported list is a set of phone numbers and not “WhatsApp user information”.