By Chinenye Anuforo, [email protected]

The viral WhatsApp voice note, purportedly made by the director and CEO of WhatsApp, that users will have to start paying for WhatsApp services, is false, Daily Sun investigation has confirmed.

The audio recording spread round a few days after Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger suffered outages that made their services inaccessible for some hours.

According to the audio, which has been forwarded many times, WhatsApp is now being controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, hence, users need to forward the message to at least 20 contacts and their WhatsApp logo will change to a new icon with facebook’s “f” within 24 hours.

“This message is to inform all of our users, our servers have recently been very congested, so we are asking you to help us solve this problem. We require our active users to forward this message to each of the people in your contact list to confirm our active users using WhatsApp, if you do not send this message to all your contacts WhatsApp will then start to charge you. Your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts,” the voice said.

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It further said: “Message from Jim Balsamic (CEO of Whatsapp ) we have had an over usage of user names on whatsapp Messenger. We are requesting all users to forward this message to their entire contact list. If you do not forward this message, we will take it as your account is invalid and it will be deleted within the next 48 hours. Please DO NOT ignore this message or whatsapp will no longer recognise your activation. If you wish to re-activate your account after it has been deleted, a charge of 25.00 will be added to your monthly bill. We are also aware of the issue involving the pictures updates not showing.”

However, Daily Sun investigation revealed that the said message has been in circulation for over six years and that Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 from Jan Koum and Brian Acton who are the founders of WhatsApp, not by Varun Pulyani or Jim Balsamic.

Also, there have been no changes in the WhatsApp logo since it was acquired by Facebook in 2014.

Moreover, WhatsApp, in its blogpost since 2012, had said the purported message was a hoax and no truth to it.