"China's Web" read the front page headline in Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
Most Australians were probably unaware that their prime minister even operated a WeChat account, given the social media platform is used near exclusively in the country by Chinese Australians.
Owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent, WeChat has over one billion users globally - including about a million in Australia.
So the report caused alarm in a nation that has increasingly come to view China as a threat to its security.
Since 2017, allegations have included espionage attempts, cyberattacks, and supposed interference in domestic politics and society. Beijing has rejected such allegations, but Australia's government has taken an increasingly firm stance.
And so on the latest news, one of the government's most strident anti-China critics quickly called for a WeChat boycott.
Senator James Paterson labelled the incident a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attempt to "[interfere] in our democracy and silence our free speech".
The sole Chinese-Australian MP, the government's Gladys Liu, said she would stop her own WeChat use. She added, "there are serious issues here" given an Australian election is due by May.
Yet, perhaps strangely for an alleged national security breach, there was no comment from Australia's intelligence agencies about any threat.
Meanwhile, net-savvy citizens and China researchers were doing their own digging on the claims.
Official WeChat accounts - ones permitted to push alerts to followers - need to be registered to a Chinese national.
Experts warned as early as 2019 that Mr Morrison's account may be vulnerable. It had long been clear it was "just registered to a random Chinese citizen", says China analyst Fergus Ryan from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
"And that always meant that at any point in time the account could be stopped, could be taken down, sold; anything could happen to it because ultimate control of the account wasn't held by Scott Morrison or his office."
Mr Morrison's page stopped posting updates in July last year. By October, the Australian leader's profile had been wiped and rebranded with one named "Australian Chinese New Life".
In November, it was authorized as an organization rather than an individual account - a change requiring at least some level of approval from WeChat.
"The timing of the [newspaper] story being released was suspicious," says Fan Yang, an academic at Melbourne's Deakin University who's researched WeChat's platform in Australia.
So what actually happened to the account?
The new account is yet to post any content, so both Ms Yang and Mr Ryan query how the News Corp paper and politicians can label it a "propaganda outfit".
And research from other Australia media soon cast the story in a different light.
Australia's multicultural broadcaster, SBS, contacted the account's new owner - a businessman who had no idea it was Mr Morrison's profile.
He said he had bought the account from its registered owner because it already had 76,000 followers from a specific demographic.
Then, Tencent also rejected the government's assertion, saying there was "no evidence of any hacking or third-party intrusion". "This appears to be a dispute over account ownership," it added.
China's foreign ministry said Canberra's accusation was "nothing but unfounded denigration and smear".
But by then, public conversation had been seized by a larger debate: a proposal by government lawmakers to ban the "untrustworthy" Chinese app. This evoked attempts by former US President Donald Trump to ban WeChat on security grounds, which were ultimately blocked by the courts
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