HOAX: This website mimicking Bank of Africa and offering grants is a scam
The financial institution has disowned it.
This website purporting to belong to the Bank of Africa and offering grants is a HOAX.
The website displays the branding of the financial institution. It then instructs users to answer a questionnaire to get the National Government Poverty Fund Subsidy.
The questionnaire contains four questions requiring the user to indicate their age, gender, whether they know Bank of Africa, and what their opinion of the financial institution is.
After completing the questionnaire, a new page congratulates the user, who is also informed that the answers have “been saved successfully”.
The message further instructs the user to select from a provided list of boxes to reveal the prize. “You have 3 attempts. Good luck!” adds the message.
Clicking the ‘OK’ button to accept the conditions brings the said boxes, and after two attempts, the gift appears amidst a cloud of confetti. A message banner pops up informing the user of winning a grant worth KSh67,335.
However, to claim the grant, the user must share the information with five groups or 20 friends about the promotions. They have also to indicate their addresses to complete the registration. The message further promises that the gift will be delivered within five to seven days.
This sequence mirrors many phishing scams that purport to offer a reward or some type of benefit but whose purpose is mining personal information.
Scammers also use tactics similar to these to carry out click fraud, a common scheme that relies on luring users to bogus websites with the promise of a reward or some other benefit.
Those who fall prey to such clickbait are also urged to share them with more people, which ultimately brings revenues to the operators of the fake offers, advertisements, or campaigns.
There is no information about the said grant on the Bank of Africa website, its Facebook page or Twitter account.
The domain name of the imposter website is starprize.top, which is not the legitimate domain of Bank of Africa, bank-of-africa.net.
The WHOIS information of the imposter website shows that it was registered on 30 March 2023 in Arizona, US.
The WHOIS information of the legitimate Bank of Africa website shows that it was registered on 12 June 2006.
In a response to PesaCheck via email, Caroline Mulwa, head of marketing at Bank of Africa, disowned the dubious website and urged the public to disregard it.
Mulwa also referred PesaCheck to a Facebook post on 18 April 2023, where the bank disowned the website.
“We care about you and your personal data which is why we would want you to be aware of scams and request that you take precautionary measures to protect yourself from scams,” read the post.
PesaCheck has examined the website mimicking Bank of Africa and offering grants, and found 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 senior fact-checker Simon Muli and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck’s managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
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.
