Fraudulent Posts Claiming To Share Jio, PhonePe Cashback Offers Go Viral

These posts sharing links to cashback offers from Jio and PhonePe are fraudulent.

All these Facebook posts run fraudulent advertisements to mislead and scam users.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

A set of posts, which claim to share links to avail cashback schemes from Jio and PhonePe, have gone viral on social media, where users are further sharing these posts.

There are several versions of these posts which tempt users with cashback offers.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

(Archived versions of these posts can be seen here, here, here, and here.)

Are they true?: No, these posts are fraudulent.

• The links each of them share led to now-defunct websites or more fraudulent pages.

• None of the organisations mentioned have shared any such information about cashback schemes.

How do we know?: We noticed that under each of these posts, the links shared to avail these 'schemes' did not carry the name of the organisations.

PhonePe

Every offer claiming to share a PhonePe scheme showed a link reading 'get.offer.com'.

The link does not reflect PhonePe's URL.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

Clicking on these links led us to a website called 'festix.in', which was inaccessible at the time of writing this report

The website shows a 403 error, prohibiting access to the page.

(Source: Festix.in/Screenshot)

When we looked up the domain registration details for this website, we saw that the link was registered in 2024 and in the United States of America.

This fraudulent website was registered in late 2024.

(Source: WhoIs/Altered by The Quint)

We compared this to PhonePe's actual domain registration details, which showed that the company's website was registered in 2015, through domain registration website GoDaddy.

PhonePe was registered in 2015 via GoDaddy.

(Source: WhoIs/Altered by The Quint)

• PhonePe announces all its offers and rewards on its social media pages, some of which can be seen on their Instagram page.

• Some of these posts informing users about cashback offers can be seen here.

PhonePe announces its offers on social media.

(Source: Instagram/Altered by The Quint)

• A blogpost shared under the 'Trust and Safety' page on their website, which addressed cashback fraud using PhonePe's name shared additional information.

• It categorically stated that "any URLs, social media posts, or phone calls promising Cashback are misleading," telling users that they did not have to take any additional action to avail cashback.

PhonePe has addressed these fraudulent schemes in the past.

(Source: PhonePe/Screenshot)

Jio's Holi Offers

Just like the links above, the offer claimed to be provided by Jio, too, carries a link that does not resemble the link to their official website.

• The link under these posts reads 'festivvholiioff.xyz' and the text with it tells the users, "You've Won Google Pay Reward."

The link does not lead users to Jio or Google Pay's website.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

When one clicks on this link, it redirects to page talking about a 'Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana', offering users ₹1,999 "for free in your bank account."

The link leads people to a suspicious website.

(Source: FestivvHoliiOff.xyz/Screenshot)

• While the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY) is a legitimate scheme by the government, it has to do with offering loans to small, micro, medium, non-corporate, and non-farm entitites, up to the amount of ₹20 lakh.

• The Press Information Bureau (PIB) had called this graphic 'fake' in a 2024 post on X (formerly Twitter).

• We also did not spot any such offers' details shared on Jio's website under the 'cashback offers' page.

• Their social media accounts on Instagram and Facebook, too, did not share details about such an offer for Holi.

Conclusion: Neither PhonePe nor Jio have announced any such cashback offers as the posts claim.

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