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Claim: A viral video showing a woman being beaten and stripped by angry mobs is allegedly linked to an armed robbery gang.
Verdict: Misleading! The footage is an old video from 2018 from an incident that happened in South Africa and not Nigeria. No credible source to back up the events was explained in the tweet.
Full Text
A video of a mob of mostly men assaulting a middle-aged woman has emerged on social media platforms like X and blogs.
Daniel Marven posted the 48-second video on his X account, showing mobs beating a middle-aged woman, with the caption, “She works in a bank. Whenever a customer comes to withdraw a huge sum of money, she will always alert robbers. Somehow, she ran out of luck on that particular day. The robbers were caught, and during interrogation, they exposed her as their main informant.”
The post has garnered six million views, 5,640 comments, and 5,102 bookmarks since it was posted on Oct. 2, 2023.
Real Mugie, in the comments, said: People have lost respect for women. This is too much.”
In the comments, another user, @Petite Human, wrote: “Why didn’t they hand her over to the authorities? How did you get this information? Did you interrogate the robbers yourself, or it’s a hearsay? No matter what she did, it doesn’t justify this lynching.”
DUBAWA decided to investigate this claim because of the conflicting opinions, the virality of the news, and the unanswered questions in the comment section.
Verification
We carefully analysed the video to get hints. We heard some of the mob in the video shouting “obeah,” a religious belief of African origin involving witchcraft and sorcery, practised in parts of the West Indies and tropical America. This means the event did not happen in Nigeria.
We also searched keywords using “woman stripped with people shouting Obeah”. We found the same video but dated Oct. 9, 2019, with the caption “South African thugs strip woman naked for dating Nigerians and other foreigners.” We also found the same video on another site dated April 19, 2018, with a different caption that wrote, “Angry mob beat a woman to nakedness.”
This shows it is an old video from 2018 with recurring captions.
We tried to find the origin of the video, as all the footage had different captions, but we could not find anything.
We also conducted a keyword search to see if any credible media outlet had reported the issue or any bank or the police and could not find any in recent times.
Conclusion
The story circulating is an old video from 2018. This means the event of the story used by the X user is misleading.
