The Commonwealth is offering scholarships, however, a misleading website is being circulated on WhatsApp.
This is a trend observed by The FactCheckHub overtime whereby scammers and phishers ride on the back of legitimate projects to carry out their activities.
The post circulating on WhatsApp read in part “Apply for United Kingdom Scholarship 2021, Fully funded scholarship to study for free in UK”, this was accompanied with a link that redirects to this website “Uk-scholarship.get-noww.xyz”.
The landing page of the website is riddled with grammatical, spelling errors as well as American spelling, this is a red flag because a commonwealth scholarship website which is funded by United Kingdom and targets applications from countries under the former British empire would be using the British spelling of ‘programme’, instead of ‘program’ as was obtainable and so on.
This and other grammatical errors can be spotted across all the pages on the website.
Another red flag from the landing page is the non-clickable social media icons. The social media icons on a website are supposed to redirect to the website’s social media handles when clicked, however this was not the case.
In addition, the page has a testimonial or user comments page that has a Facebook like comment interface, however the commenters profile, just like the icons, were not clickable too.
Furthermore, after filling the form, a prompt to share the website link to a number of whatsApp individuals or groups appears. This is one of the characteristics of scam and phishing websites observed by The FactCheckHub in a report about scam websites in Nigeria.
The FactCheckHub had earlier noted in a report here on how to spot and avoid such scam websites.
