No joke: Nathan Hartono annoys potential scammer by spamming Henry Thia stickers on WhatsApp

There are many ways to deal with scammers who text you on WhatsApp or add you to dubious group chats  — you could ignore and report them, respond with anger or even humour.

I once sent the entirety of the Bee Movie script to one.

Local singer-songwriter Nathan Hartono recently annoyed a potential scammer who added him into a group chat claiming to be related to travel website Trip.com by spamming stickers of veteran actor Henry Thia's face.

The 32-year-old shared his shenanigans in a series of images on Instagram Stories, and in the first photo, the alleged scammer can be seen telling others to "just click on link take a screenshot and send in group" and they would send them a Telegram link to get paid.

Nathan posts a photo of Henry with a side parting, looking directly into the camera. It appears a previous sticker he sent was deleted by the admin already.

The next photo shows Nathan spamming even more stickers of Henry's face, from the 71-year-old smiling in army attire to him looking like a goth in dark eyeshadow and lipstick.

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At this point, the alleged scammer changes the group's settings to only allow admins to send messages.

The final Story by Nathan shows 12 of his messages — presumably all of Henry's face — being deleted by the alleged scammer before he is left with a "You can't send messages to this group because you're no longer a member" note at the bottom of the chat.

He either annoyed them so much that he got kicked out of the group or left on his own accord, though the former makes for a much funnier scenario.

While Nathan may have had fun spamming the stickers, there's a way to avoid being added into random (and potentially nefarious) group chats in the first place.

Just go into your WhatsApp's privacy settings, go into Groups and select "My contacts" under "Who can add me to groups".

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drimac@asiaone.com

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