Posted on: September 14, 2021 Posted by: Kamadi Amata Comments: 0

Safaricom’s head of fraud, Patrick Kinoti, has dismissed the website as a hoax.

Syndicated story by PesaCheck.

This website claiming to offer gifts to Safaricom customers is a HOAX.

The site’s link is only accessible via mobile web. It invites Safaricom’s mobile network users to check if they have been selected for the “Safaricom 2021 Customers Gifts”.

If a customer clicks on the “Check it” button, they are redirected to a page requesting their contacts.

A search on WHOIS reveals that the website was created on 8 July 2021, under the domain name safcomkenya.club.

This does not match the information relating to Safaricom’s official website, which according to WHOIS search results, was registered on 12 February 2003, under the domain name safaricom.co.ke.

Further, this fact checker reached out to Safaricom’s head of fraud, Patrick Kinoti, who distanced the telecom from the website and urged clients of the telecommunications provider to be vigilant and avoid such fraudsters.

Similarly, in a video shared on YouTube by the mobile service provider, Kinoti says the company is set to educate users on how to detect fraudsters.

“Currently we have started a campaign called an ‘all is on’ campaign using different channels. So we have above the line which we go on the media using the radio, TV and other channels like SMS… our target is to get 100 percent of our customers trained,” Kinoti says in the video.

PesaCheck has looked into a website claiming to offer gifts to Safaricom customers and finds 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 news 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 fact-checker Cynthia Kanyali and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Rose Lukalo. The article was approved for publication by managing editor Enock Nyariki.

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.

Follow Us

Like Us

Email Us

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.
https://mtaaniradio.or.ke/2021/09/14/hoax-this-website-claiming-to-offer-gifts-to-safaricom-customers-is-a-scam/
mtaaniradio.or.ke
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
75531
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FC5BGHTQ7ABHCSI3UTGFWLDQBPI3J6DA
<urn:uuid:12dd09ff-8f15-421b-a194-8fafc4c0efbb>
2021-09-16T23:57:26Z
207.180.237.29
text/html
sha1:IYKMAU4EHNOCCEXAZUVWP3NNLEUOHGMD
<urn:uuid:529ee0f3-ef30-4fd7-aa99-dc3dbfc6c730>
https://mtaaniradio.or.ke/2021/09/14/hoax-this-website-claiming-to-offer-gifts-to-safaricom-customers-is-a-scam/
response
<urn:uuid:57008281-905e-4d21-9210-ebc754cb04bc>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-22
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/