IN SHORT: These three personal Facebook accounts are running promotions and offering generous giveaways across Facebook groups. But beware, they are run by scammers and are out to defraud users.
The Facebook accounts Jeff Ongala Mwati, Polly Poppy and Ken Best are posting promotions on Facebook groups and offering money to Kenyans.
The three accounts post simple questions and ask users to answer in order to win the cash. They also use photos of local celebrities as their profile photos and in their posts.
A typical post from one of the accounts reads: “Find the missing numbers and get #Citizentv Promotion 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 20. KSH 35,000.”
The accounts target Facebook groups with thousands of members and ask those interested to reach out via the WhatsApp number provided.
Some of their posts have been published here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
But are these offers to be trusted? We checked.
‘Unlocking fee’ scam
Their posts are poorly written, with omitted words, odd punctuation and random capitalisation. These are the first signs that users may be dealing with fake accounts.
We checked each account's promotions and the prize money on offer and found them to be far from realistic.
For example, users are asked to wish a random Kenyan celebrity a happy birthday for a chance to win a cash prize of KSh35,000 (US$227). The amount to be won does not match the minimal effort required to win it.
They also ask the supposed winners to send a message to the WhatsApp number to claim their rewards. We tried each account.
The Facebook account Jeff Ongala Mwati told us that we needed to pay a registration fee of KSh499 to access the prize money. Polly Poppy asked for an “unlocking fee” of KSh486, while Ken Best asked for KSh799. These are all clear signs of a scam.
The accounts in question are fake and their offers are a scam.
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