Scam Alert! BBC News about Anant Ambani and ANI about Sam Pitroda are bogus!
All of these fake news stories go on to promote an online investment platform and invite you to sign up to get quick cash. These links are frauds that operate online.
Claim
Rating
Explanation
A photograph of Anant Ambani from a BBC news interview featuring the headline, “He didn’t realize the microphone was on- Maybe the end of the career.” Upon selecting the image’s link, we were directed to a prominently displayed webpage featuring the BBC logo. The article was captioned as “CNBC-TV18 management refuses to comment on the scandal surrounding its interview “Vantara (Star of the Forest)”
Similarly, Anant Ambani’s picture appeared in a Facebook post titled “India’s richest man’s son blabbed on live TV.”
Likewise, we received another X link using a picture of Sam Pitroda, with the same headline featuring the logo of BBC News.
Come, let us verify the integrity of these assertions and articles.
What’s the truth?
We began our investigation by clicking on the viral news link provided with the images of Anant Ambani. Interestingly, they led us to a page on an internet investment platform.
To know the authenticity of the particular site namely, “Escapekpom.com” we used the scam detector validator and learned that this site is “Untrustworthy. Risky. Danger.” This indicates that the URL for these news websites that pose as the BBC logo in an attempt to attract clicks and deceive users is a fraudulent one.
Then we looked at the just-released news report using the BBC logo. The BBC website did not display any items with the title “CNBC-TV18 management refuses to comment on the scandal surrounding its interview ‘Vantara (Star of the Forest)'” though we searched using the same title.
Upon closer inspection, we also noticed that the URL of the widely shared piece differs from the BBC stories’ original URL. In other words, the article is a fabricated story.
In the same vein, we received a story including an image of Sam Pitroda along with the news agency ANI’s logo.
While we clicked the link we were taken to a page with an article captioned “HT Media Group management refuses to comment on the scandal surrounding its interview “ANI News.” As we carefully read the article, we saw that the URL was, once more, not the one that ANI had originally used. Instead, it displays the web address as “https://hydrocleanpowerwashing.com.”
The aforementioned data reaffirms that the widely shared story featuring Anant Ambani with the BBC logo and Sam Pitroda’s post featuring ANI News is a hoax and not authentic, as the viral claim implies.
All of this information suggests that scammers are exploiting viral articles using well-known news organizations and iconography, therefore we ask users to exercise caution when clicking on such bogus links.
Conclusion:
Thus, we conclude that the BBC article about Anant Ambani and the ANI article about Sam Pitroda are digitally fabricated fake news.
