IN SHORT: News anchor Lulu Hassan does not have a Facebook page dedicated to promotions and promising people money. This page using her photos is run by scammers.
The Facebook page Betty Betty frequently posts promotions on a Facebook group in Kenya with over 578,000 members.
The page uses the photo of Lulu Hassan, a prominent news anchor for the Kenyan channel Citizen TV, as its profile picture and on some of its promotions.
The page posts simple questions and informs users that answer that they have won. It then asks them to reach out through a WhatsApp number.
For instance, on 24 June 2023, the page asked Facebook users to identify the missing numbers in a list it posted.
A typical reply by the page to those who comment is: “CONGRATULATIONS #Approved. You won sh.35,000 #Whatsapp me on: 07-51-359-953 To claim START WITH WORD PROMOTION_2023.”
The promotions have been posted here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
But are the offers legit? We checked.
Scam promotions
There is little activity on the page’s timeline and this is the first indication that the account is not to be trusted. The only activity is changing profile pictures of Hassan.
But suspiciously, it has posted numerous promotions on the Facebook group, most of them poorly written.
The promotions on the page in question do not feature on Hassan’s official Facebook page, which has over 1.4 million followers. It is unlikely that she would run a different, less popular account with a different name specifically to offer promotions.
We texted the WhatsApp number on the posts and were asked for personal details such as our full name, location and M-Pesa number.
We were then informed that we had won KSh35,000 but were asked to send an “unlocking fee” of KSh486 to another number. This clearly shows that this page is run by fraudsters.
To protect yourself from online scams, read our guide to Facebook scams and how to spot them.
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