Claim: Viral links on WhatsApp claim that Peak Milk is giving customers a chance to win ₦100,000 after filling out a questionnaire in commemoration of its 68th anniversary.
The acclaimed links giving customers of Peak Milk a chance to win ₦100,000 after filling a questionnaire are malicious and were created to mislead unsuspecting members of the public into falling victims of fraudulent schemes. As such, this claim is False.
Full Text
Peak milk is a brand in the Nigerian dairy industry, produced by Friesland Campina WAMCO Nigeria Plc, under the auspices of the Royal Friesland Campina N.V. First attempt to establish the company in Nigeria began in 1954 but local production started in 1975.
Since then, it has embarked on various projects to boost patronage and give back to society. In commemoration of the Christmas season in 2021, the company unveiled the Merry Peakmas campaign tagged #ShareLoveShareNourishment where winners were rewarded with Peak Milk (Nourishment) in a box and N20,000 worth of shopping vouchers.
In line with this offer, different links are now circulating on WhatsApp, all claiming to give out ₦100,000 in commemoration of the Peak brand’s 68 years of operations in Nigeria. Some of the links are provided here, here, and here.
When each of these links is clicked, the user is forcefully redirected to a form that requests answers to four questions: User’s familiarity with Peak Milk, age, rating of service delivery and gender. Subsequently, the user is congratulated for successfully providing answers and informed to pick three boxes from an array of 12 boxes that containing different prizes.
The first choice is replied as negative, while the second choice contains the ₦100,000 prize.
To claim the prize, the user is informed to ‘tell 5 groups or 20 friends about the promotion.’ After that is executed, the user address is requested to complete the registration and to deliver the ‘supposed’ gift ‘within 5-7 days.’
Verification
The first noticeable red flag with the website is the limited use of the brand name in the hyperlinks. A genuine link offering such information uses the brand name in the website domain name; which is the case with the original website of Peak Milk https://peakmilk.com.ng/.
Additionally, DUBAWA uncovered that the connection protocol HTTP is not encrypted. This simply implies that any information provided on such a website can be intercepted by third parties who may intend to gather data shared between the two systems. As a result, the user’s information can be easily hacked in comparison to an encrypted site (HTTPS).
When the authenticity of the website was further analyzed on Scamvoid.net (a website that provides information about a website’s reliability), findings revealed a poor trust for the page and outlines that the domain name is very recent (about 12 days ago) and traffic is low. These are also similar traits of malicious websites previously fact-checked by DUBAWA.
Typical of such websites, it was discovered that neither the comments, page logo and listings were clickable. Also, all the comments available on the destination website showed that they were made ‘minutes ago’ without any change, irrespective of the time the page is visited. These are forged comments that are used by fraudsters to lure unsuspecting victims.
DUBAWA also discovered that the website was changed to something entirely different after a few days, making it difficult to track the details of the perpetrators. This scenario is found to be similar to previous links fact-checked by DUBAWA, which were discovered to be fraudulent, with a potential to expose users’ details to cybercriminals.
Although Peak Milk is yet to reply to an email of inquiry sent to them as of press time, preliminary findings conducted on all the publicity channels of the company show no affiliation to the alleged link in question.
Conclusion
The acclaimed links offering customers of Peak Milk a chance to win ₦100,000 after filling a questionnaire are malicious and were created to mislead unsuspecting members of the public into falling victims of fraudulent schemes. Therefore, this claim is False.
