An emoji-based message designed by hackers to crash or freeze iPhones is sending scare among the phone owners, after some reports of it crashing the expensive devices.

The’ encrypted message’ can freeze your Apple iPhone even without you opening it. This means that the message can freeze your iPhone as soon as you receive it. Yes, the moment you receive the emoji message on your iPhone — it will freeze.

The message, first reported by EverythingApplePro YouTube channel, consists of two emojis and characters.

The ‘message-of-death’ includes three characters — a white flag emoji, a zero (0) and a rainbow emoji along with an invisible character called variation sector 16 or VS16.

When a text with these characters is received, an iPhone becomes temporarily unusable, with the touchscreen and physical buttons not responding.

The process is much more convoluted, but — in most cases — it does not completely crash the recipient’s iPhone, but it slows it down and is generally quite annoying.

Ordinarily, iOS would create the rainbow flag by linking the white flag emoji with the rainbow emoji, using a hidden character known as VS16.

However, in this case the two emoji are separated by the ‘0’, causing the system to crash and rendering the touchscreen and physical buttons unusable.

Fortunately, the effect is only temporary, and affected phones should continue to operate as normal after a minute or so of inactivity.

WATCH: This message can crash you iPhone