The youth project used its official Twitter account to flag the website using their name to offer business grants as a scam.
Syndicated Story By PesaCheck.
This website claiming that the Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) is offering business grants worth KSh 40,000, is a HOAX.
The landing page of the website claims that 32,186 youth have received business support. Out of these, 26,922 have received grants worth KSh 40,000, while 5,264 have been coached in business management.
“85% of youth who received business grants have created employment for themselves and others,” the website further claims.
Youth are instructed to apply for the grants by filling out a form with their personal information such as their name, phone number, address (area of residence), and email address. This appears to be a phishing attempt geared towards harvesting people’s data.
We searched for KYEOP’s official Twitter account to verify if the website is legitimate and followed the link attached to the account’s Twitter bio. The link led to a different website from the one we are fact-checking.
We then performed a Whois search of the two websites. We discovered that the fake website’s domain name, “blogspot.com”, does not belong to KYEOP but to blogspot.com, an American online content management system owned by Google that enables you to build and host websites and blogs for free.
The legitimate website linked to the official KYEOP Twitter account is registered under the domain name “kyeop.go.ke”.
Moreover, KYEOP has flagged the imposter website as a scam on their official Twitter account.
“Our attention has been drawn to the message below circulating in social media. It is FAKE,” KYEOP writes in a tweet.
The organisation further notes that they do not offer such business grants and their grant applications are currently closed. “KYEOP is not involved in any activity like that. Our programmes are Training, Small Business Grants and BPC (MbeleNaBiz). However, applications for those intakes ended,” the tweet says. The social media post flagged by KYEOP also has a link, which typed out on Google leads to the website we are fact-checking. KYEOP is a project that aims to empower and improve the welfare of the youth by exposing them to training, internship, and business grant opportunities. PesaCheck has looked into a website claiming that the Kenya Youth Employment and Opportunities Project (KYEOP) is offering business grants worth Ksh 40,000 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 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 Naomi Wanjiku and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Rose Lukalo. The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck 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.
