The website is not affiliated to the giant telecommunications company and asks users to share the information with others in order to claim their gifts.
Syndicated story by PesaCheck.
This website impersonating Safaricom and promising cash prizes through the telecom firm’s mobile money platform, M-Pesa, is a HOAX.
A message accompanying the link to the fake website purports to be a testimonial from a winner who has already received their gifts.
The message adds that individuals who have been Safaricom subscribers for at least two months are eligible for the giveaway worth Ksh 5,000.
This fact-checker clicked on the link to the website to ascertain the veracity of the claims. The link opens up a page with M-Pesa’s branding, and a message asking the user to participate in a promotion..
As part of the application process, the user is instructed to complete a survey containing four questions before they can receive the reward. The questionnaire asks for information on whether the user is a Safaricom subscriber and their opinion about the telecom company, how old the user is, and whether they would recommend the company to their friends.
After answering the questions, a new message pops up informing the user that their answers have been successfully ‘saved’.
Participants are further instructed to select a gift box from the set of boxes provided and have three attempts to correctly pick the one containing their reward.
Once the ‘correct’ box has been selected, another message pops up acknowledging that the user has won the M-Pesa cash gift. However, in order to redeem the said gift, the user is asked to share information about the promotion and provide their phone number. It is after this stage that the customer’s mobile wallet will be debited within 15 minutes, the post claims.
The WHOIS information of the impostor website shows it was registered on 20 November 2020, in Reykjavík, Iceland. Information about the registrant is hidde.
On the other hand, the WHOIS information of the legitimate Safaricom website shows it was registered on 12 February 2003.
There is also no information regarding the said promotion on Safaricom’s website, where the organisation publishes information about its promotions, and neither is the information available on its Facebook or Twitter accounts.
PesaCheck has looked into the website impersonating Safaricom and promising cash prizes through the telecom firm’s mobile money platform, M-Pesa, and finds it to be a HOAX.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Simon Muli and edited by PesaCheck deputy editor Rose Lukalo. The article was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
