IN SHORT: Beware of Facebook pages with offers that seem too good to be true. These three offering easy loans for motorbikes in Kenya are run by imposters and should be ignored.
The Facebook pages Watu Motorbike LOANS 0738157366, Watu Credit Second hand and new Motorbikes and Motorbike On Loans are offering motorbikes on credit to Kenyans.
Watu is an asset finance company operating in seven African countries, including Kenya. The pages use its name as well as photos showing its logo.
A typical post on one of the pages claims that users can get different brands of motorbikes for a KSh7,000 deposit (about US$52) and a daily payment of KSh200 (about US$1.5) for 12 months.
To get the motorbikes, users are asked to provide their identity cards, Kenya Revenue Authority details, guarantors, an active phone number and the first payment.
The pages’ posts have been republished widely. They have been published on different dates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
But are these pages to be trusted? We checked.
Scam pages and offers
The presence of random capitalisation, repetition, misspellings and odd punctuation in the ads is one of the first signs that they are scams. Large companies such as Watu usually invest in social media management teams to avoid publishing poorly written content.
Reputable financial institutions are expected to have an official website or app where applications can be made. Two of these pages don’t link to any, while the other links to an unrelated website. They instruct applicants to reach out via a call or WhatsApp. This is unusual for a company claiming to be genuine.
None of the phone numbers provided by the Facebook pages are listed on Watu’s website. This is a clear sign that they are all fake.
Africa Check visited Watu’s official Kenyan Facebook page and found well-written posts.
The three pages in question are fake.
To help protect yourself against such scams, see Africa Check’s guide to Facebook scams and how to spot them.
Republish our content for free
For publishers: what to do if your post is rated false
A fact-checker has rated your Facebook or Instagram post as “false”, “altered”, “partly false” or “missing context”. This could have serious consequences. What do you do?
Click on our guide for the steps you should follow.
Publishers guideAfrica Check teams up with Facebook
Africa Check is a partner in Meta's third-party fact-checking programme to help stop the spread of false information on social media.
The content we rate as “false” will be downgraded on Facebook and Instagram. This means fewer people will see it.
You can also help identify false information on Facebook. This guide explains how.
Add new comment