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Promise Eze
Claim
A broadcast message has been circulating on WhatsApp claiming that the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate for the 2023 general election, Bola Tinubu, is giving out N15,000 in cash to all Nigerians as campaign grant.
The full text reads:
“TINUBU (2023) N15,000 CAMPAIGN GRANT.
Benefits of this Campaign Grants.
To create General Support
To Support Youth and Every Citizens.
To Create Awareness about Posstivity Of BAT.
Hurry Now and Check if you are Eligible to Receive TINUBU (2023) N15,000 CAMPAIGN GRANT.
This Grant is Available To all Nigerians.
APPLY HERE”
ROUNDCHECK first observed the message to have grammatical errors and a suspicious link. Hence, the need to verify the message.
One of the red flags is capitalization error and spelling error: the use of ‘Every Citizens‘ instead of ‘every citizen’, and also ‘Posstivity’ instead of ‘positivity’, among other red flags of grammatical errors and sentence structure.
ROUNDCHECK Findings
A click on the link in the message shows a homepage displaying a flier containing a photo of the APC presidential candidate with his name spelt out as ‘Bola Ahmed Tinubu’. Written beneath the flier are the words ‘N15 000 CAMPAIGN GRANT’.
But the link in the claim quickly changes and redirects to another malicious site (from lyupz.com to freeclaim-it.online) — a red flag to identify fake sites.
The homepage also contains a paragraph which gives the reasons for the grant and why it should be applied for.
It claims that the APC presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is giving out N15, 000 grant to Nigerians as a way of soliciting support from them in the 2023 general elections.
Part of the text reads:
“The APC presidential Candidate for 2023 General Election Bola Ahmed Tinubu (BAT) has opened another opportunity and a great step ahead of 2023 General Election to help and solicit support from Nigerians against coming Presidential Election by Proving the Sum of 15,000 in Cash to all citizen and this is part of 2023 Presidential campaign and a benefit to all Nigerians.”
It further urged those interested, to fill in a form and personal information about the applicant’s identity, location and gender was requested.
In this new redirect link, the landing page shows errors in the text used on the graphic picture: improper use of punctuation marks where necessary, improper capitalization of letters in between sentences and repetition of the same message.
A political party will not create a message full of such simple easy-to-notice errors, neither will it emanate from a presidential candidate.
A ‘select your category’ button was also displayed where an individual is expected to select whether he is Unemployed, Employed/Self Employed or a Student.
An individual then has to tick a small box to agree to apply for “TINUBU (2023) N15,000 CAMPAIGN GRANT”.
However, ROUNDCHECK noticed that even without filling the form an individual can click apply and access the next page.
On the next page, a congratulatory message appears where the applicants are also requested to provide answers to a quiz.
Question one asks about employment Status, question two asks about marital status of applicants while question three says: “Do you need this N15,000 Grants?” Surprisingly, the options provided do not answer the third question.
A response to the quiz above leads to the next page where applicants are informed that they’ve been selected to benefit from the grant.
Meanwhile, applicants are required to invite 15 friends or share the link to 5 WhatsApp groups. The site stated that only the invitation can guarantee withdrawal code.
We have checked in previous reports that when a site asks you to forward messages or links to friends or other social media pages before you can be paid/withdraw, it is a fake claim.
Using Site Verification Tools
With the aid of Scamadviser, a platform that helps verify the authenticity of a website, ROUNDCHECK was able to get some negative highlights about the claimed website.
The website has only been registered recently but it hasn’t had a lot of visitors and the website has been placed for sale. This is a potential red flag indicating that the website is used for dubious purposes.
Scamadviser also warned that the website was set up recently.
It is worth noting that scam sites are often very young and they are removed from the web after a couple of months as too many consumers leave negative reviews and social media comments.
According to the result found on Whois, we noticed that a private person registered the website with the name ‘Namecheap’ (the registrant is hiding under namecheap). The suspicious name has no correlation with the grant or the giver of the grant.
ROUNDCHECK noticed that the website (freeclaim-it.online) was registered on the 11th of May, 2021, updated on the 12th of March, 2021 and it was meant to expire on the 11th of June, 2022.
ROUNDCHECK made a thorough search through the verified social media handles (Twitter and Facebook) of the APC presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the official website of the All Progressives Congress but couldn’t find any information relating to the claim of the N15,000 campaign grant.
Hence, the fake site is misleading the public and collating personal information of unsuspecting visitors of their site.
The presidential flagbearer of the APC, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is not sharing 15,000 campaign grant- as at the time of this report; obviously not through the fake link in the claim.
Verdict
The claim that the APC presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is giving out N15,000 as campaign grant is INCORRECT.
EDITOR’s NOTE: We have checked in previous fact-checks and concluded that the links with lyupz are fake, malicious and misleading. It is created to steal users’ personal information. We urge the public to stay at alert and beware of accessing these websites.
This report is written under the ROUNDCHECK’ Volunteers Network Project 2022, under the guidance of the editorial team.
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