Is Safaricom Giving Away Ksh 7,000 Gift Voucher?

This message doing rounds on WhatsApp groups claims that Safaricom is offering Ksh 7,000 gift vouchers to a select number of customers in celebration of its anniversary.

Background

Safaricom is one of the biggest mobile telephony and money operators in East Africa. Over the years, the company has been using various promotions and gifts to reach out to its prospective clients, such as Safaricom@ 21 to celebrate its anniversary. 

With this, it could be easy for anyone to fall victim to similar phishing scams, just like the ones Piga Firimbi has flagged in the past. 

Verification

The purported gift voucher is not available on Safaricom’s official website. Piga Firimbi ran a URL search and found that the domain was registered on October 11, 2021 and updated 6 days later. The domain owner has their details hidden by Withheld for Privacy ehf a company that allows users to hide their identity when registering domains and thereby having their names and addresses redacted on domain name searches.

The purported Safaricom promotion uses one of its most popular products, M-Pesa to try and lure unsuspecting users that it is legitimate. After answering two questions, the site leads to a page that asks you to enter your personal details including your email address and phone number.

At the bottom, the webpage shows a Facebook feed of users approving the promotion. An inspection using the google chrome inspection tool shows that the feeds are static images placed on the website. From offers previously flagged by Piga Firimbi these Facebook users appear across most of the phishing links. 

A search on Safaricom’s official website shows that the company registered its URL on 12th February 2003. A search on Domain Big Data also shows that the company has registered other top level domains encompassing extensions such as .za, .africa , .com and .mobi.

Verdict

Promotions claiming that Safaricom is offering Ksh 7,000 to select customers on its anniversary are FAKE.

 This story was produced by Africa Uncensored in partnership with Code for Africa with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie.