Ochaya Jackson Amos is a University of Juba student pursuing a Bachelor of Art in Development Communication. He is a certified Fact-Checker and has been a media practitioner. Jackson is also interested in research, and information technology, which he is passionate about.
Jibi Moses is an administrator, public health practitioner, and humanitarian with five years of experience. Moses is also a skilled researcher and certified fact-checker. He describes himself as a creative, resourceful, and flexible individual able to adapt to changing priorities while maintaining a positive attitude and strong work ethic. He’s a clear and logical communicator who can establish rapport with supervisors, colleagues, and individuals to achieve organisational and personal goals.
Moses graduated with a Bachelor of Public Administration from Kampala International University. With an Advanced Certificate in Public health from Ristal Institute Juba. Currently, he is a program manager for Junub Youth Action Network (JYAN).
Ghai Aketch Deng is a news reporter with Sawa Sawa Network. He covers stories on the environment, youth, education, peace implementation, and humanitarian situations in South Sudan.
Before joining 211 Check, Aketch worked as a photographer and technical studio operator for KU-TV Kenya. He also worked for Jhpiego-John Hopkins University affiliate as a supervisor for outreach programs.
Additionally, he volunteered for humanitarian organisations, working as an English language teacher in various refugee camps in Uganda. His work experience in the humanitarian sector has helped him better understand issues affecting communities and the role of digital media in storytelling, healing, and peace-building.
Writer: Ghai Aketch
More often than not, most people overly confuse Somalia and Somaliland, thinking that it refers to the same country. However, the differences are very distinct as explained for you below by 211 Check.
Somalia is an independent state, which acquired self-rule in 1960 from Britain and Italy who had established British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland which later merged and gained independence in 1960 as Federal Republic of Somalia.
However, in 1991 Somaliland declared itself autonomous from Somalia after a rebel group, Somali National Movement (SNM) led a rebellion: toppling the ruling government that year. Somaliland became self-governing with its capital city in Hargeisa, and up to date holds democratic elections.
Regardless of its proclaimed independence, Somaliland is not recognised as a sovereign state. Some analysts, however, assert that the African Union is reluctant to declare Somaliland an independent state fearing that other secessionists might seek to split from already independent states which can subsequently undermine the continent’s stability.
Although Somaliland is not a recognised state, it goes for democratic elections and has a complete structure of government. Its currency is Somaliland Shilling (Sl.Sh) whereas Somalia’s currency is Somali shilling (SOS). Also, both regions are located in the horn of Africa, bordering the Indian Ocean.
But due to different economic levels 1 USD in Somalia is equivalent to about 570 SOS, Somali shilling and also the same US dollar is about 10,000 Somaliland shilling. In Somaliland, due to currency devaluation, people carry bundles of money in bags or wheelbarrows to buy basic items.That compelled the government to introduce cashless transactions through mobile money payments.
A week ago, a post published by tabloids went viral stating that 1 US dollar in Somalia is equivalent to 9,000 Somaliland shilling. The post unintentionally confused Somalia with Somaliland:
“In Somalia, $1 is equivalent to 9,000 Somaliland shillings – the currency is so devalued that people roam the markets with piles of money in wheelbarrows.” The post reads partly.
Screenshot of a Facebook post by Juba TV
Some people assume it’s Somalia that is referred to as Somaliland to mean land of Somali. But they’re different as explained above.
Writer: Ochaya Jackson
A widely circulated WhatsApp message claiming that drinking hot lemon water can cure cancer is false.
The message, which warns people against using conventional cancer treatments and claims that mixing lemon fruit with hot water “is 1,000 times better than chemotherapy,” was attributed to Dr. Guru Prasad Reddy BV, who claimed to be a professor at Osh State Medical University in Moscow, Russia.
Screenshot of the claim posted on Facebook
“Screening will not and cannot lower the cancer cases. There are very many people who are going to India. A friend who has been going to India for the last three years because of cancer told me 50% of people in the cancer clinics in India are usually Africans (Kenya/Uganda) etc. Sadly, many don’t make it even after these treatments, this is the bit that we are never told,” reads part of the message on social media.
“Blend a whole lemon fruit with a cup of hot water and drink it for about 1-3 months first thing before food and cancer would disappear, research by Maryland College of Medicine says, it’s 1000 times better than chemotherapy”, the message adds.
211 Check established that Dr. Guru Prasad Reddy is a specialist in plastic surgery at Apollo Spectra Hospitals, Hyderabad-Kondapur in India, not professor at Osh State Medical University in Russia.
And Osh State Medical University is a public University in Kyrgyzstan not in Moscow-Russia as claimed. The link is here
And 211 Check found no publicly available research published about lemon treating cancer by University of Maryland, College of Medicine. And lemon is not even in clinical trials as a medicine for cancer at the University.
In 2017, the claim was posted on a Facebook page by Home Ayurvedic remedied which garnered 102 comments, and 280 shares was also referenced to have been written by Dr. Guru Prasad Reddy. The link is here
The same message was also shared many years back and attributed to several doctors from different countries and institutions which some of them debunked as fake and said the claim was completely false.
AFP published a fact-check in August 2021 on the same claim as false which at that time was attributed to Chief Executive Professor Chen Horin from Beijing Military Hospital who according to AFP the professor was faked.
“This matter is very important..…lemon slices in a glass of hot water can save you for the rest of your life. Hot lemon water kills cancer cells. Cut a lemon into three pieces and put them in a cup. Then pour hot water in it. It’s done (alkaline water). Drinking it on a daily basis will give special benefits”, AFP quoted a post on Facebook in 2018 which was shared 125,000 times as said by Professor Chen Horin.
However, AFP found out that the real chief physician Chen Huiren at Beijing Military Hospital name was the one faked in the claim, not Horin.
A cancer specialist at Bangladesh Cancer Society Hospital, Prof Dr Golam Mohiuddin Faruque, who was quoted by AFP said the claim was a hoax but said lemon can prevent some types of cancer however, not cure.
“No one can say hot lemon water…..can cure cancer and such claims have no scientific basis. There are different types of cancers and many of these have their own ways of treatment but drinking hot lemon water is definitely not among them. Citrus fruits including lemon sometimes can have some positive impact in preventing certain types of cancers but that’s not a treatment.” he was quoted as saying by AFP.
The lemon cure claim for cancer has been also disputed by the National Center for Health Research as untrue after modified citrus pectin – a carbohydrate in the peels of citrus fruits studied with humans’ prostate cancer was unsuccessful.
And it said limonoids chemical found in citrus peels has proved ineffective in preventing cancer in human beings.
Dr. Manish Singhal termed the claim as myth but it is a good idea to have lemon either in hot or cold water because it will keep one very hydrated by washing toxins and acids in the stomach. However, thinking that it can cure cancer is not true.
Cancer Research UK in 2013 has also clarified that “there’s no scientific evidence to show that lemon juice can cure cancer, despite what is on the internet”.
And the U.S. National Centre for Health Research, “lemons are not a “proven remedy against cancers of all types,” and no studies have ever been done that would compare the effectiveness of a lemon to chemotherapy.”
There is currently no World Health Organization (WHO) factsheet on lemon curing cancer in patients, and what is circulating on the internet about lemon hot water curing cancer remains just a hypothesis not scientifically proven.
211 Check investigated posts on lemon hot water curing cancer that have been going on for years in various platforms, with others claiming that the lemon is 10,000, 10, and 1,000 times more effective than chemotherapy are unproven. And because no scientific studies have proven the claim to be true, it remains a health myth.
South Sudanese who sunk their hard-earned money into a “US venture capital firm” promising mouthwatering returns are worried. They have reason to be – there are many signs that not all was what it seems to be.
Writer: Emmanuel Bida Thomas
One cannot miss the frustration and mounting worry among those who invested in Silicone Valley Shares, which claims to be a US-headquartered venture capital firm with more than $6.4 billion in assets under management.
“In developed countries cases of fraud are treated as criminal cases but in South Sudan we are used to suffering and have to endure this big scam,” Ezekiel Matiop, an investor, told 211 Check.
He had lost US$3,400 he said, and had already written it off, even as he called for those responsible to be punished. “The good thing is that it has taught us a great life lesson”.
Caesar Lemmy told 211 Check he had lost $1,542. “My experience is so bad, I wish I didn’t take the initiative of investing my hard earned money there, the company’s problems keep on increasing every day, I am not sure if they will ever operate again.”
Several other investors interviewed by South Sudan broadcaster Eye Radio in late September 2022 also spoke of their concerns they had lost their money. One said they had invested $4,100, and that he was in a WhatsApp group of hundreds of other investors – and they could be more.
Venture capitalists provide financing or other investment to startup companies and small businesses, trading the risk for the hope of handsome returns. But it is not clear what exactly Silicone Valley Shares’ model was.
Public records seen by 211 Check and also shared on social media show Silicone Valley Shares was registered in South Sudan by the justice ministry in December 2021 as “Silicone Valley South Sudan Co. Limited.”
But the company, which promised outsized profits, has run into major headwinds in the country. Its website was suspended in early September before being restored. Its offices were subsequently closed by security services and investors reportedly stormed its office in the capital Juba due to their inability to withdraw their funds.
Lemmy said he had tried to withdraw his money unsuccessfully. “I tried after they restored the website, but the money was never deposited into my account, and most people are also complaining about the same,” he said.
The company has kept a low profile, save for a man who claimed to be an executive saying its Juba staff had been detained. In an interesting twist, the staff in question denied this as “baseless”.
A more recent body blow was an order to local banks by the central bank to freeze its accounts.
As the debate – and distress – rages, 211 Check took a longer look under the hood and identified several red flags.
We have asked the firm to comment on our findings, but they are yet to respond at the time of publication.
The firm’s name is clearly meant to identify it with the Silicon Valley region, an area in the US known for incubating and housing a large number of technology and software companies.
Silicone Valley Shares claims to have “helped launch and commercialise 200-plus companies since 2010, including investments in “DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, LinkedIn, Rapid7, SurveyMonkey, Taleo, and TellApart.
These companies did not immediately comment on whether Silicone Valley Shares was an early backer when 211 Check contacted them through email.
But DocuSign, Kiva Systems and LinkedIn were all founded in 2003, well before 2010, the year Silicone Valley Shares claims it was established.
Its website domain history is inconsistent with its supposed founding date. A domain record gives information about a website, including who it is registered to and when the site was first registered.
A search of Silicone Valley’s record on Whois and Domain Age Checker, two popular domain tools, shows 29 October 2021 as the date on which the website was created. It is however possible it existed in a different form before then.
Screenshot of the Whois Record for siliconevalleyshares.com
A search on Cloaking Checker, a tool which checks if a website is trying to fool search engines so as to get a better ranking, reported a “possible cloaking attempt”.
Archived versions of the Silicone Valley Shares website, captured between 21 December 2021 and 30 August 2022 on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, list the following “expert management team”:
However, reverse image searches – a way of tracking down the usage history of a photo – on their profile pictures show markedly different details. Lew Son seems to be Johan Dennelind, a Swedish businessman and current board chair of KCOM, one of the longest-established providers of communications services in the UK.
Jenifer Sting appears to be Jen Leary, the chief executive officer of US accounting and consulting firm Clifton Larson Allen LLP. Alex Joe is Johan Thijs, a Belgian and the chief executive of KBC Group, a Belgian financial services group. Rather strikingly for a CEO, Zhirong Jeffrey has no digital footprint.
Our efforts to contact the real people through LinkedIn and their current companies were unsuccessful at the time of publishing.
Screenshot of what Silicone Valley Shares claims to be its team of experts captured on 24/12/2021
The “management” team’s profiles were removed in later versions of the website, but the site still features testimonials from three supposedly satisfied clients.
The testimonials are allegedly from Arjun Thankar, Racheal Davis and Adebola Ogundipe, from India, the US and Nigeria respectively.
Screenshot of alleged user comments on the Silicone Valley Shares website
But reverse image searches show that the photos of Thankur and Davis are stock images – widely available photographs anyone can use either for free or for a fee instead of commissioning a photographer.
That of Ogundipe is actually of Ernest Ojeh, a Netherlands-based Nigerian user experience designer.
Contacted via LinkedIn, Ojeh told 211 Check he had never heard of the company.
“I am shocked to see this. I have no idea who runs Silicone Valley Shares and why they have used my picture on their site. I have never heard of them before,” he said.
US records come up empty
Silicone Valley Shares claims to be a limited liability company (LLC) headquartered in San Jose, California in the US. According to the California Corporations Code, a limited liability company is required to file articles of organisation with the California Secretary of State.
Information on any corporation or business entity in the United States is usually obtained by performing a search on the Secretary of State website of the state or territory where that corporation is registered.
The California Business Registry office directed 211 Check to its public portal for “entities made of record with the California Secretary of State’s office”.
A search on the portal returned no results for a limited liability company named Silicone Valley Shares.
Screenshot of search results for entities made of a record with the California Secretary of State
On its website Silicone Valley Shares claims that its office address is City View Plaza 100 W San Fernando St #320, Downtown San Jose, CA 95113, USA. However, the address’s street view shows a street and a building that appears to be a residential apartment.
When one searches for “Silicone Valley Shares LLC” on Google maps, the result returns the location 320 San Jose Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94110, United States, and not City View Plaza 100 W San Fernando St #320, Downtown San Jose, CA 95113, USA.
This inconsistency is unlikely in an established company anywhere in the world, let alone with hundreds of billions of dollars.
Manipulated images of alleged “Silicone Valley Shares LLC” offices and events on Google Maps
Further, the uploaded images of the San Jose Avenue address also appear to be either stock photos or images that have often been clearly edited.
A reverse phone lookup also showed that the area codes of the company’s two listed phone numbers are for the states of Ohio and Nevada , not California, where San Jose is located.
There are still more inconsistencies. In this blog post on its website, Silicone Valley Shares states that its clients will access its services using m-Gurush, a mobile money platform popular in South Sudan.
However, mGurush on social media said it was unaware of Silicone Valley Shares and that they were not in a partnership.
Screenshot of tweet reply from m-Gurush
M-Gurush requires users to register, deposit and withdraw cash through an agent. But investors in Silicone Valley Shares reported a different method.
“There’s what they called float, so you give cash to someone who has float, and he sends you the float, then you can invest that float,” Matiop told 211 Check.
A typical contract can be seen here. Investors are also paid their interests through bank deposits or in cryptocurrency.
Silicone Valley Shares has a referral programme which claims that when your friends or new investors you bring into the business click on a website link and make an investment, you are credited with a particular percentage commission of their investment amount.
An investor can commission up to a certain level, which is how pyramid schemes work. In this case one can commission up to a fourth level.
Screenshot of Silicone Valley Shares referral programme
On 23 September 2022, the Central Bank of South Sudan directed all commercial banks in the country to block and freeze all accounts of Silicone Valley South Sudan Co. Limited.
Letter from the Bank of South Sudan directing commercial banks to freeze accounts of the company
Banks have started complying. The Equity Bank of South Sudan told 211 Check “it had already blocked the account of Silicone Valley when the rumours about their business came out”.
Another bank, Ecobank, told the Voice of America’s South Sudan in Focus programme that it would close the company’s account in keeping with the regulator’s order.
211 Check asked finance and technology experts about the company. Silicone Valley Shares promises investors profits of between 350% and 876% for investments of a minimum $50 and a maximum $100,000. This is calculated hourly.
David Marko is a software engineer at the Juba-based Nilotech firm. He said no investment or financial technology firm accrues hourly interest for their investors while consistently claiming to be immune to the risk, or operates with aggressive multi-level marketing, forcing their clients to keep onboarding people.
“A scam is usually apparent when a company tries to sell the most complicated asset or idea to the least educated customers. They claim investments for customers in US stock markets to a customer base from a country that doesn’t have a local Securities Exchange,” Marko said.
“If it sounded too good to be true, it is because it is,” he said. He highlighted “better alternatives” for South Sudan’s rising middle class such as savings and credit corporations (Saccos) and microfinance companies.
Marko has also made a thread on Twitter about his reservations.
Deng Akoi Arok is a financial technology (fintech) entrepreneur in South Sudan’s capital Juba. He said fintech is the use of technology to improve delivery of financial services mostly through a user interface (UI).
“While Silicon Valley Shares provided a dashboard, its returns were not verifiable because no one knew their product. It’s been labelled as a cryptocurrency company but does not fit any known crypto business model,” Arok told 211 Check.
Wani Steven, a technology lawyer at Witness Law Advocates in Juba, told 211 Check that the lack of proper means by how the company’s money multiplies “ is a serious threat and should be investigated”.
The police headquarters in Juba have told aggrieved investors to open cases as Silicone Valley Shares is registered in South Sudan.
Spokesperson Maj Gen Daniel Justin reportedly said documents the law enforcement agency had obtained supported this.
The documents have been doing the rounds on social media and include a certificate of incorporation from the justice ministry and a letter of “no objection” from the interior ministry.
But the technology lawyer Steven told 211 Check that these were not enough.
“My view is that Silicone Valley has not complied with all the laws regulating the type of business they were engaging in.
Incorporating a general trading company, and acquiring letters of no objections and approval to acquire stamps from the police, is not sufficient for the type of business they were doing.”
Steven said that as a platform that conducts online services,which includes engaging in share trade,) they should have obtained a licence from the NCA.
They should also have gotten a licence from the central bank “which generally regulates any business that engages in money lending or similar engagement to what Silicone Valley was doing”.
In its letter to banks, the central bank of South Sudan said it froze the company’s shares because it is “still under investigation on issues related to compliance with all the relevant laws of South Sudan”.
All available evidence indicates that Silicone Valley Shares is not a registered LLC in California, as it claims to be. The company’s name is not in the California Secretary of State’s Office’s business database. Its website address does not correspond to the address on Google maps, and its phone area code does not match San Jose, California, where it claims to be based.
On its website and Google Maps, the company uses a mix of stock images, manipulated images, and photos of seemingly arbitrary individuals, which is unusual for a legal entity.
This report by 211 Check was written as part of the 2022 Africa Check fellowship programme. The programme is one of many ways in which Africa Check fosters the practice of fact-checking across the continent.
