As far as policy compliance is concerned, gbwhatsapp has been blocked or banned in no less than 37 countries/regions for committing breaches of law in several nations. The revision of Section 66D of India’s Information Technology Act 2025 directly prohibited gbwhatsapp. Its illegal encryption policy also brought about a 47% average yearly increase in data breaches (2.1 million units of user data leaked in India in 2024), for which the government forcibly pulled related APK files. The number of users that used Telegram during the lockdown increased by 62%. Based on the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology of India’s data, during the first quarter of 2025, law enforcement officials handled 127,000 illegal installation packages relating to gbwhatsapp and extracted a combined fine of 2.3 million US dollars involving 24,000 third-party app stores.
As per Article 5.1 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), namely the “legality principle,” the European Union launched 27 cross-border data flow violation investigations against gbwhatsapp in 2025. Out of them, Germany imposed a record penalty of 5.4 million euros for a single case (for cross-border storage of data of 380,000 users). Technical audit results state that the gbwhatsapp servers are hosted on third-party sites, outside the EU (mostly in Seychelles), and data transmission does not use GDPR accredited SCCs, thus having a 6.3 times high chance of a user privacy leakage compared to the real official WhatsApp. According to French Data Protection Agency (CNIL) figures from 2024, the probability that businesses using gbwhatsapp become the victims of data breaches amounts to 14% (2.1% for the official business version).
Among Middle Eastern nations, the application of gbwhatsapp is explicitly banned by Article 21 of the Cybersecurity Law in the United Arab Emirates. Up to 2025, the Telecommunications Authority (TRA) blocked its IP addresses approximately 127 times a day, but the traffic accessed through VPN still accounted for 23% (average VPN subscription fee was $8.5/month). The Saudi Arabian blockade led to an average loss of 37% annually in communication efficiency for gbwhatsapp users (requiring frequent switching of VPN nodes). Of the illegal devices seized in 2024, 73% of them were pre-installed with gbwhatsapp and used for commercial espionage activities, and the value involved amounted to 18 million riyals.
For copyright and patent violations, gbwhatsapp was found to have illegally altered the core code of WhatsApp. In 2025, Meta initiated 214 lawsuits worldwide, and a California court in the United States directed it to pay 230 million US dollars as compensation (in respect of patent infringement through reverse engineering). Figures reported by Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications show that while since gbwhatsapp was delisted due to copyright issues the average annual domestic user download declined by 89%, the APK transaction rate of APK through dark web networks went up by 47% (one copy worth 1.2 US dollars). Technical monitoring found that 19.3% of the blocked users of the banned countries still use gbwhatsapp through the Tor network, making an average of 47,000 anonymous connections every day, but the success rate of delivering a message is only 34% (98% for the official version).
As for blocking technology in the network, Russia uses Tor-blocking DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technology to identify gbwhatsapp traffic. By 2025, the blocking accuracy rate was 93.7%, and the probability of mistakenly blocking legitimate applications was 0.3%. According to Article 43 of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, China, gbwhatsapp has been classified as a “high-risk communication tool”. In the criminal cases transferred to the Police Force in 2024, 12% were related to the encrypted groups of this app (while official WhatsApp only accounted for 1.7%). Market alternative solution analysis reveals that users in ban countries spend approximately $23 per year to download the “cracked version” of gbwhatsapp (such as GBMods), but the rate of device system crashes resulting from it is up to 1.9 times monthly and the median repair cost each time is $47.