Fact-check: Is Ecobank offering 100,000 pounds for free? No, it is a scam and should not be interacted with

Writer: Ochaya Jackson

A claim that has been making the rounds on WhatsApp groups that Ecobank’s National Government Subsidies campaign is offering internet users the chance to win up to 100,000 South Sudanese Pounds (SSP) after correctly answering four questions, is a hoax.

“Do you know Ecobank?” one of the questions asks. “What age are you?” “What are your thoughts on Ecobank?” “Also, are you male or female?”

Despite being warned that the link is a phishing scam, several users have continued to share it in WhatsApp groups and with their contacts. This is a phishing scam, in which people pose as trustworthy companies or organizations in order to obtain personal information from victims.

After answering all of the questions, one is supposedly eligible to win prizes, but it then instructs people to share with five groups or twenty WhatsApp friends as conditions before claiming the prize, which is supposed to arrive within five to seven days, according to the claim.

These links, however, are phishing scams. An investigation by 211 Check discovered that the claim is a scam from an entity or individual who is not the real Ecobank Group, and you should not click or interact with them.

A search on Google and the Ecobank Group website for National Government Subsidies yielded the result “No match found.”

According to publicly available information on the Ecobank Group’s website, the website where the claim about the Ecobank offer is posted does not match with the true website features of the Ecobank Group. The official Ecobank website is: https://ecobank.com/. 

The same offer has also not been shared on the social media accounts for Ecobank on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn.

211 Check also used Virustotal to examine the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and discovered that the URL link of the claim is flagged as dangerous by five security vendors (BitDefender, G-Data, Webroot, Fortinet, and Kaspersky) as malicious [malicious, malware, and for phishing].

Whois Record of the phising link versus Ecobank website:

The Ecobank domain was registered in January 1998, while the phishing link was registered in July 2022. It is always a red flag when a site was created around the time it went viral.

Conclusion:

211 Check concludes that there is no offer of such kind going on with the Ecobank Group.

The links being shared are scams. You should not click or interact with them. This sort of scam is called a phishing scam, which is where people pretend to be trustworthy companies or organisations in order to get personal information from victims.

Criminals use publicly available information about you online (including social media sites) to make their phishing messages more convincing.

You can reduce your chances of being phished by considering what personal information you (and others) post about yourself, as well as reviewing your privacy settings on your social media accounts.

Recognising a scam

It might be a scam if:

• it seems too good to be true – for example, a holiday that’s much cheaper than you’d expect 
• someone you don’t know contacts you unexpectedly
• you suspect you’re not dealing with a real company – for example, if there’s no postal address
• you’ve been asked to transfer money quickly
• you’ve been asked to pay in an unusual way – for example, by Mobile Money or through a transfer service like MoneyGram or Western Union
• you’ve been asked to give away personal information like passwords or PINs
• you haven’t had written confirmation of what’s been agreed