There is currently no solution yet for this issue, so users are advised not to open messages received from unknown numbers or contacts.
For the past few years, WhatsApp and other messaging apps have been targeted by hackers who have found ways to disable them and inconvenience customers.
Recently, a new text bomb has appeared that can cause WhatsApp to crash, resulting in a phone freeze, as well as the loss of all chats and correspondence.
Who creates text bombs
The Whatsapp community blog WABetaInfo gave these text bombs the name "Scarry Messages". Text bombs of this kind are reported to initially appear in Brazil and then spread to other regions of the world.
Basically, any contact can send you a message containing a lot of strange characters. They won’t make sense to you, but WhatsApp may misinterpret the message, causing it to crash.
Sometimes WhatsApp also fails to fully display the message because its structure is not familiar: the combination of these characters creates a situation where WhatsApp cannot process the message, resulting in an infinite crash.
Infinite crash means that when you open whatsapp it freezes and crashes. If you try to open the app again, it will still crash. So far, there is no effective and general solution to this problem.
Fail with Contacts
Scary messages are very dangerous, because of them you can lose the ability to open the application until you reinstall it. However, if you haven’t made a backup up to that point, you will lose your entire chat history.
A new type of text bomb is a large volume of contacts in Vcards format. At the same time, the name of each contact has dozens of unusual characters, which ultimately leads to the application freezing. The vulnerability is relevant for both iOS and Android devices.
There are many secret WhatsApp groups where users share similar messages. Usually a text bomb is created for a specific platform, so there are whatsapp groups sharing codes to crash whatsapp for android and other groups share "scary messages" to crash whatsapp for ios.
What should I do if they sent me a "scary message"?
A Twitter user showed several posts and explained that the unofficial versions of WhatsApp implemented a kind of "crash code protection". However, installing these apps is not recommended as they may change the behavior of the WhatsApp code, which may cause your messages to be encrypted incorrectly.
If you receive a text bomb, try deleting the message and blocking the contact using WhatsApp Web. Then set your privacy settings so that only your contacts can add you to groups, because other unknown contacts can add you to groups and then send text bombs there.
If you are unable to link your WhatsApp web session to your device (because WhatsApp keeps crashing), then unfortunately you have to reinstall WhatsApp, losing all conversations. For this reason, we recommend backing up your chat history at least once a week if you care about your messages.
Unfortunately this problem has been around for over 3 years now. No one knows if WhatsApp is trying to solve it, but most likely not. The most optimal solution to this and many other problems with WhatsApp is to switch to Telegram.