Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Pankaj Menon is a fact-checker based out of Delhi who enjoys ‘digital sleuthing’ and calling out misinformation. He has completed his MA in International Relations from Madras University and has worked with organisations like NDTV, Times Now and Deccan Chronicle online in the past.
Claim
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is offering “three months free recharge” so that more people can vote for Congress in the 2024 general elections.
We received this claim on our Whatsapp tipline (9999499044), requesting us to fact-check it.
Fact
Newschecker noticed that the text in the Whatsapp message was similar to an earlier forward, which falsely claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was offering “three months free recharge”, indicating that it was a scam following a certain template.
Newschecker had debunked the “BJP’s free recharge yojana” claim, finding that there was no such scheme and the website was deemed suspicious by Scam Detector, a major fraud prevention resource.
We then inspected the link provided in the Whatsapp forward, which brought us to a website (left), stating “Congress Free Recharge Yojana”, and another link, “Get Free Recharge”, that asks us for our number. A comparison with the website from the earlier BJP claim (right), shows that it is the same design.
Similarly, the URL, inc.in@congress.2024offer.com, raised our doubts as the Congress’s official website address reads, https://www.inc.in/. We then ran a keyword search for “Congress free recharge yojana”, which did not lead us to any credible news reports or official statements of such a scheme. We also looked up the Congress’s official website for the scheme, which, again, did not throw up any relevant results.
Newschecker learnt that the “2024offer.com” website was found to be “very suspicious” by Scam Detector and that it has one of the lowest trusting ranks, 3.9, hence, marked as “Young. Unsafe. Warning.”
“The biggest problem is the fact that the domain name is too new. It was registered just a few days ago. This makes it almost impossible for a super new website to open the business, promote its services, convince clients to acquire them, use them, and then take the time to submit the reviews online. All of this is just a few days,” read the detector’s review.
We have reached out to cybersecurity experts and will update this article once we receive a response.
Result: False
Sources
Analysis
Scam Detector review
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
Pankaj Menon is a fact-checker based out of Delhi who enjoys ‘digital sleuthing’ and calling out misinformation. He has completed his MA in International Relations from Madras University and has worked with organisations like NDTV, Times Now and Deccan Chronicle online in the past.
