<p>I am running a classified website where people can post their items and others can contact them via Whatsapp for more details. My website was attacked today and I'm seeing a huge amount of link clicks on the Whatsapp button in Google Analytics, it can't be artificial. I think it's some bot grabbing the phone number from the button link. </p> <pre class="brush:php;toolbar:false;">$phone= $row_posts['phone']; // for example $phone=" 212612345678" <div class="contact"> <a class="btn btn-success" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://wa.me/212$phone?text=TextMessage"> More Details </a> </div></pre> <p>I use it for Whatsapp buttons. As you can see, the phone number is easily displayed in the link href. I saw some websites like "www.mubawab.ma" using Whatsapp button but you can't see that number first time in inspecting the code. I want to implement similar functionality so that I can protect my user phone numbers from bot web scraping. </p>

<?php
    function obfuscatePhone($phone){
        return base64_encode($phone);
    }
?>

<div class="contact">
  <a class="btn btn-success" data-wakey="<?php echo obfuscatePhone("+212612345678");?>" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="#!">
More Details
 </a>   
</div>

<script>
    const wa = document.querySelectorAll("[data-wakey]");
    wa.forEach((e) => {
        const p = atob(e.dataset.wakey);
        e.href = "https://wa.me/212" + p + "?text=TextMessage";
    });
</script>

const wa = document.querySelectorAll("[data-wakey]");
wa.forEach((e) => {
  const p = atob(e.dataset.wakey);
  e.href = "https://wa.me/212" + p + "?text=TextMessage";
});

<div class="contact">
  <a class="btn btn-success" data-wakey="KzIxMjYxMjM0NTY3OA==" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="#!">
More Details
 </a>
</div>