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
Mukesh Ambani-owned Jio is offering free recharge for one month to celebrate Ambani’s birthday.
Fact
Newschecker started by inspecting the link provided in the Facebook post, which brought us to a website, stating “Mukesh Ambani Birthday Offer: Free Unlimited Recharge for 28 Days”, and another link, “Get Free Recharge”, that requires us to enter our number.
The URL, https://www.goodphoneoffer.com, raised our doubts as Jio’s official website address reads, https://www.jio.com.
We next ran a keyword search for “Jio free recharge Ambani birthday offer”, which did not lead us to any credible news reports about such a scheme. We looked up Jio’s official website for the scheme, which, again, did not throw up any relevant results.
Newschecker learnt that the “goodphoneoffer.com” website was found to be “very suspicious” and marked “Young. Unsafe. Warning” by Scam Detector, a major fraud prevention resource.
“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. Hence, the above-mentioned Young. Unsafe. Warning,” read the report that gave a high phishing score of 90/100, a malware score of 63/100, which raises red flags.
We contacted cybersecurity consultant Hitesh Dharamdasani regarding a similar viral Whatsapp message on this “special Jio recharge offer”, who said, “This message is completely fake and a part of pushing forward a fake website that will help collect numbers of citizens. In this way, numbers are obtained by fraudsters and used for scams.”
Also Read: Viral Video Of Massive Castle-Themed Cake Not From Anant Ambani’s Pre-Wedding Gala
Result: False
Source
Analysis
Scam Detector review
(with inputs from Newschecker Marathi’s Prasad Prabhu)
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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.
