IN SHORT: The Facebook page M-kopa Loan Motorbikes Kenya has over 25,000 followers and offers them motorbikes on credit. But beware, this is just another scam trying to defraud customers.
The Facebook page M-kopa Loan Motorbikes Kenya would have you believe it is run by M-Kopa, an asset financing company operating in Kenya and four other African countries.
The page has 25,000 followers. The profile picture and cover photo are probably of M-Kopa's staff and customers.
It claims to offer motorbikes and tuk-tuks - three-wheeled taxis - on credit. The page requires users to pay a deposit to get them “within 24-hours”.
A typical post on the page, dated 28 January 2024, reads in part: “Hello good news,, Welcome to our new month New OFFER IS HERE..You can now apply for a loan motorbike and get within 24hrs...for assistance call 0106090609 or WhatsApp 0775122851.”
It then lists different amounts of money to be paid as a deposit for each of the products. The page also invites users to make enquiries.
But is the page and the offers real? We checked.
Page ‘not genuine’
While many legitimate organisations would normally have social media pages linked to working websites, the website on this page does not open. Users therefore have no access to information about the nature of this company. This is a red flag.
We also found that the posts were badly written. For example, they are poorly punctuated, repeated on different dates and some words are randomly capitalised. This is an indication that they do not come from a professional institution that cares about its image.
The “page transparency” section shows that it was created on 17 May 2023. This is odd since M-Kopa has been operating in Kenya since 2010.
M-Kopa’s official Facebook page has over 289,000 followers and links to its website, m-kopa.com. It has listed its official mobile phone contacts for Kenya as +254 799 136 761 and +254 707 333222. The numbers provided by the suspicious Facebook page “0106090609” and “0775122851” are not among those listed.
We contacted the company’s official Facebook page and asked if they were associated with the page in question.
“Kindly note that this is our only Facebook page and the other one sent is not a genuine one,” they told us.
The page is fake and its offers are scams.
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