Claim: A viral WhatsApp message claims Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) is recruiting.
Our findings show there’s no ongoing recruitment by NERC and the recruitment portal linked in this message is not trustworthy.
Full Text
Recruitment and job offers continue to be exploited by misinformation peddlers to defraud, harm or steal information.
Recently, a viral WhatsApp message which claims the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) is conducting a recruitment exercise was sent to DUBAWA for verification.
This message contained a link described as the recruitment portal for the commission’s 2022 recruitment exercise.
Verification
DUBAWA first opened the link contained in the WhatsApp message as this led to a website, recriutment.online. The wrong spelling of recruitment as “recruitment” in the website address was the first red flag.
We followed the registration process, which was divided into three phases. The first phase requires applicants to enter details like their name, phone number, age, educational level and state of origin.
The second phase requires applicants to answer a few questions, while the final phase tasks applicants to invite friends and family before their recruitment form is available. This is a practice common with fraudulent websites.
We conducted a keyword search which led to a disclaimer notice by the commission on similar false recruitment adverts that have been in circulation. These adverts, according to the disclaimer, request employment processing fees.
We also found out that while it is true, the commission had earlier in June put out a recruitment notice on its Twitter account, this exercise expired on July 15, 2022.
The portal address used for this recruitment was “careers.nerc.gov.ng”, different from the one provided in this message.
image of the recruitment notice.
We visited the recruitment website provided by the commission and saw a notice on the welcome page that its 2022 recruitment exercise is closed.
We then analysed the link contained in this WhatsApp message on ScamAdviser, a reliable online tool that dictates scams and rates the trustworthiness of websites.
This showed several indicators that the website may be a scam, giving the site a trust score of 1/100.
Conclusion
Our findings show there’s no ongoing recruitment by NERC. The recruitment portal linked in this WhatsApp message is not trustworthy and is different from that of the commission.
