A message circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook in July 2021 claims Nigeria’s Federal Civil Service Commission is recruiting people for jobs in several ministries, departments and agencies.
“FEDERAL CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION FCSC RECRUITMENT VACCANCIES ANNOUNCEMENT,” the misspelled message reads.
It links to a web page where people can supposedly apply.
But are the vacancies genuine? We checked.
No advert on civil service website
We checked the commission’s website for the job offers but came up empty.
In 2019 the FCSC alerted people to a false online recruitment advert. “For the avoidance of doubt, any recruitment exercise by the FCSC is advertised on its official website, as well as in print and electronic media,” it said.
It added that it did not advertise jobs on social media.
Dodgy web pages
There are other signs that the supposed recruitment is not legitimate. The web page’s address – its URL – was shortened using Bitly.
The page itself is unprofessionally designed and dodgy-looking, and asks applicants for personal details. More than this, when Africa Check visited it a few days later it redirected to another suspicious page headed “MTN Science & Technology Scholarship Scheme Form”.
The earlier page claimed that over 140,000 Nigerians had applied for the FCSC vacancies, with more than 16,000 reviews – giving it the high average rating of 4.8 out of 5.
But both the FCSC and MTN pages use the .xyz domain, not the Nigerian government’s gov.ng domain. This is the official domain host for all federal, state and local government websites.
The ad is fake – as other fact-checkers have also found. It’s just another online scam.
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