“If anyone is going through a hard time right now there's a new relief Program that will help you out from Give Directly relief Program (sic),” reads a Facebook post published on August 18, 2022, and shared more than 1,200 times in a neighbourhood watch group.
It includes a screenshot of a digital receipt showing $1,014 paid into a GiveDirectly prepaid card.
A link in the post encourages people to click and sign up for “instant rewards”. However, the URL leads to a spam web page claiming to offer financial assistance to people who “sign up today”. The page has now been taken down but the original version can still be viewed here.
Different Zimbabwean Facebook accounts shared the same screenshot to community groups in the United States, including the Toombs County Yard Sale group, Niagara County Yard Sale in Sanborn, and Prescott and area sales.
The posts, however, are a hoax.
A reverse image search of the screenshot led to a Forbes article from April 2020 describing how struggling Americans, hit hard by the Covid-19...
Kolkata: Kolkata Police has been grappling with a fresh challenge since the past week — controlling fake news. While it initially started with fake circulars, beginning with "restrictions" on cert...