Whatsapp Profiles Scraper

The Whatsapp Scraper Actor allows to search for profile info on the Whatsapp network and download the data gathered as a HTML, JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML doc.

The actor will accept as input an array of phone numbers, and will return for each:

• The Profile picture of the user (a reachable url).
• Whether the number is registered on whatsapp, or not.
• The user's About info.
• When was the last update of the About info.
• Type of whatsapp account (if it's a WA for Business or WA regular account).

Users can test the Actor at no cost on its free version listed here.

The backend service supporting this Actor is also available on this site operated by inUtil Labs.

With this actor you can process large batches of data (there's no limit set, add as many data-points as you wish on a single run). There's also an API based version of all the features of the Actor.

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Why scrape Whasapp Profiles?

WhatsApp is reported to have more than 2 billion monthly active users globally, and is ranked among the most popular mobile messenger apps in the world. With so many active users, you can imagine that there is a lot of useful data on the Network.

So what could you do with that data? Here are some ideas:

• Customize your contact center with up-to-date profile pics of your customers.
• Cyber Security: Monitor and track the profile pictures of WhatsApp users, helping to identify suspicious or fraudulent activities.
• For marketing purposes, such as displaying targeted ads or offers based on users' WhatsApp profile pictures.
• Offer personalized services by incorporating WhatsApp profile pictures of users into their accounts. This could include personalized greeting cards, photo books, or other types of customized products.
• When a prospect register on you site, you might want to know if the phone number provided is a real whatsapp number.
• When integrated with social media platforms, you could allow users to update their social media profile picture with their WhatsApp display picture or vice versa.
• If the whatsapp account is a WA for Business, understand how real businesses are promoting their brand, their opening hours, web-page...
• The whatsapp handle you set is tipically the way you are known among your family and friends... this might be relevant on how you want to approach a customer next time you talk to him/her.
• Collect a constantly updated dataset and gain insights into ongoing changes.
• Carry out market or academic research.

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Is it legal to scrape Whatsapp?

The Whatsapp Profile Scraper is ethical and does not extract any private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. It only extracts what the users have chosen to share publicly on the Whatsapp network, and therefore we believe that the scraper, when used for ethical purposes by Apify users, is safe. However, you should be aware that your results could contain personal data. Personal data is protected by GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers. You can also read Apify's blog post on the legality of web scraping. Bear in mind that Whatsapp (Meta) might not be following the same ethical principles: read

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Cost of usage

When running the Whatsapp Profile Scraper Actor on the Apify platform, there are two factors to consider:

• Compute units - used for running the Whatsapp Scraper.

• The number of records has no direct cost to consider, but the usage costs differ depending on how many profiles (phone numbers) you are scraping, because the time of execution for a large batch of numbers will be higher.

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How to use the scraper video guide

The Whatsapp Profile Scraper is very easy to use as shown on this video.

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Input parameters

Numbers: (mandatory field)

The input of this scraper must be an array of phone numbers that have to be checked on the Whatsapp Network. The array has no limit, add as many numbers as you wish.

The whatsapp number must be written as: countrycode and number; do NOT include any non-number character, spaces, or anything which is not a number. Otherwise the job will not be processed. Examples: of correct numbers are: 34123456789 (for spain) or 491234567890 (for Germany).

Do NOT include '+' before your countrycode. Do NOT include a '-', or any other character or space (anything which is not a number) as part of your phone number. If you do not know if you are using a valid country code check this list of valid codes.

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Whatsapp Profile Scraper output format

The actor stores its results in a dataset. Each item is a separate item in the dataset. You can also download Whatsapp Profile Scraper data as a HTML, JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML doc.

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