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.
A news report is doing the rounds on social media, stating that Indian billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani has found a get-rich-quick scheme that is transforming people’s lives.
According to the report, Adani announced a new “wealth loophole” during an interview with journalist Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor in the show Good Morning India, where he is to have allegedly said that he can transform anyone into a millionaire within three-four months. The report adds that the businessman has urged everyone in India to jump into this amazing opportunity before the big banks shut it down for good.
The scheme Adani purportedly referred to is a new cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Ethereum Code, which is “helping regular people in India, Asia and North America build fortunes overnight”. The report further goes on to describe how the program, “backed by Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Bill Gates”, is designed to cash in on the cryptocurrency boom and how it’s looking beyond conventional currencies like Bitcoin. “Some of these cryptocurrencies include Ripple, Ethereum, Monero, Zcash and they are still making returns of over 10,000% and higher for ordinary people in India. Ethereum Code lets you profit from all of these cryptocurrencies, even in a bear market. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically handle long and short selling for you so you can make money around the clock, even while you sleep,” the article read.
Fact check
Newschecker first noticed the masthead of the webpage, reading “Indian Expres”, which is not how the news major is spelt. The correct spelling of the publication is “Indian Express” and the logo on the official website can be seen only on one side, flanking the word “The”. We also noticed the URL of the news report is “clrygdnwd.digital”, which is different from the official Indian Express website. The official URL is https://indianexpress.com, confirming that the supposed Adani interview is from a dubious website.
Newschecker then did a keyword search for the terms “Adani Ethereum code”, “Adani Indian Express Interview,” “Adani bitcoin scheme”, and found that there were no news reports, either from Indian Express nor from any other news website on such an announcement from the businessman.
While reading the article, we found several inconsistencies and factual errors, such as Adani’s age being listed as 79 instead of 60 and a sudden reference to one Bachchan as the interviewee. Towards the end of the article, we came across a case study of Aarav Chadha, an online editor who volunteered to try out Ethereum Code. We ran a reverse image search of the picture of Aarav Chadha and his family and found it to be a stock image of an Indian family.
Upon clicking the word Ethereum Code mentioned across the article, we were taken to a suspicious web page asking for bank details, vague descriptions of funding and requests to register quickly, all signs pointing to a scam.
The article also stated that Adani had appeared on a show “Good Morning India”, upon invitation by co-host Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor, to share any tips he had on building wealth. This was where the “tycoon and bountiful philanthropist dropped a bomb”, regarding the “wealth loophole”. We ran a keyword search for such an interview between Adani and Kapoor and got no relevant results. We then got in contact with Kapoor, currently multimedia editor at Moneycontrol, to ask if such an interview had happened. We will update this article once a response is received.
Old Claim Revived
Newschecker has earlier fact-checked a similar claim of a viral news report in October 2021, this time the subject being Azim Premji who allegedly urged people into investing in a dubious bitcoin website.
In this case, The Indian Express itself debunked the report in a tweet.
On comparing the fake Premji and Adani reports, we saw that the headline, the summary and case studies of both the articles were the same, indicating that it was a scam, which followed the same template, merely replacing the names of the businessmen and the program. We later learnt, via searches using the keyword “bitcoin loophole”, that a similar fake interview has been reported with Amitabh Bachchan, revealing that this was the crypto scam’s modus operandi.
Update: The same fake news report has gone viral again on October 8, 2022, this time using Mukesh Ambani’s name. The archived version of the report can be seen here.
Conclusion
An imposter website, using a fake Indian Express interview with Gautam Adani, is misleading people into investing in a shady cryptocurrency program.
Result: False
Sources
Newschecker fact-check, October 19, 2021
Indian Express official website
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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.
