The mystery behind the "Don't touch the black dot" whatsapp prank

There has been a prank lately on whatsapp that appears to be in form of a text warning users not to click a black dot otherwise phone will hang.

Although this prank is completely harmless but of course it scares the hell out of most messaging service users, not because of the hanging the phone experiences after clicking on the text,  but the mystery behind it. Cyber voodoo? No. It's just a simple control character logic.

The message is most likely to appear in that format a text with a hand Emoji pointing to a direction and a space or more before a concluding text. The space between the main text and concluding text is where the magic control character is.
 The control character is a type of character used in html for aligning or structuring texts in html documents and whatsapp can't detect such characters.

When you convert the message into HTML you can see just how mischievous this innocuous little message is. That repetition of “‎ &rlm:” are actually something that’s called a control character.

For example, if you’re writing a Word document in Urdu, the text runs from right to left. Now, if you want to put an English word in here, it’ll be scrambled by that alignment. Instead, you use this control character to specify this word is instead aligned left to right ($lrm;).

In this case, the creator of this message can use multiple of them to momentarily overwhelm your WhatsApp (at least for Android users). You don’t see it either because this is an invisible character. That’s why, with a touch interface, tapping on the first part of text here does nothing, whereas tapping on anything after is what causes the app to hang.

So no, it’s not WhatsApp magic, just a troll with technical knowledge and too much time on their hands.

To convert text to html visit Wordtohtml.net