Claim: A viral WhatsApp message has a claim that the Vice President of Nigeria, Yemi Osinbajo, is offering grants to Nigerians.
The Vice President of Nigeria, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, is not offering grants to Nigerians. The viral message is a method used by ill-meaning individuals for their fraudulent activities.
Full Text
The 2023 presidential election is getting closer for Nigerians to make crucial decisions on who gets to pilot the affairs of this country for the next four years.
The stomach infrastructure syndrome is a thing in Nigeria as politicians seek to attract voters before and during an election period.
In 2017, Punch published a report with images depicting how far Nigerian politicians go to win the hearts or votes of Nigerians.
As a result of the affluence of politicians over the years, DUBAWA has fact-checked claims like this, as scammers continue to hide under the images of prominent politicians. For example, we exposed that scammers pose as Tibubu to defraud online users.
Recently, a message is making the rounds on WhatsApp, with the claim that presidential aspirant, Yemi Osinbajo, is giving out a grant of ₦33,000 to Nigerians.
According to the message with this link attached, the ₦33,000 support grant available to Nigerians is from the Vice-president Campaign Support.
Due to the virality of this claim and the possible effect it could have on the electorates’ decisions, DUBAWA chose to verify it.
Verification
DUBAWA carried out a keyword search on the grant to ascertain the existence of grants from the presidential aspirant. We found no grant offer from Mr. Osinbajo.
Inherent red flags
An analysis of the link on Domainbigdata, a web service used to verify domain’s ownership, reveals multiple users have reported the website for abuses.
There is a common red flag on links like this, and this is the existence of deceitful testimonials on the page. Internet con artists have been found to use this method to draw potential victims into their caves. Also, the links to the supposed comments are not clickable nor followable as it particularly appears on the page.
Another obvious red flag we spotted is the contents on the page replete with grammatical errors, poor punctuations and user experience. For instance, the page has it that “on Monday 25th of April 2022. Offer a matching grant of ₦33,0000 to individuals to support youth and all Nigerians to solicit for your support upon declaration of my interest to run for the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria”.
Apparently, the message went viral on WhatsApp due to the conditions and instructions on the website.
As shown in the screenshot above, the page asks visitors to share the information further to reach more people. This implies that those who are drawn by the information will share it further, hence its virality. Con artists frequently use this strategy to entice people to visit their websites.
We also found a supposed sponsor card on the page attached with a bar tagged ‘contact’. The supposed contact at the bottom of the page is not clickable, seemingly taking us nowhere.
Conclusion
Our findings show that the presidential aspirant, Yemi Osinbajo, is not offering ₦33,000 to Nigerian youth under the National Youth Empowerment Funds.
