IN SHORT: The Kenyan government aid programme Inua Jamii is frequently impersonated on Facebook, targeting the desperate and vulnerable. This page in the programme’s name is another example and its posts should be ignored.
The Facebook page INUA JAMII SOFT LOAN claims to offer loans to Kenyans on Facebook.
The page uses the name and logo of Inua Jamii, the Kenyan government programme that gives cash grants to poor and vulnerable people. “Inua Jamii” is Kiswahili for “uplift the community”.
One of the posts on the page, dated 21 April 2023, reads: “Good morning and congratulations kwa Wale ambao walipokea loan Kama uko online na hukupokea loan Kutoka INUA JAMII LOAN from ksh10,000 to ksh300,000 na uko online Sasa tuma neno #LOAN kwa 0759 092480 kwa njia ya SMS ama whatsapp BUSINESS LOAN PERSONAL LOAN SCHOOL FEES EMERGENCIES.”
The mix of English and Kiswahili translates as: “Good morning and congratulations to those who received their loans. If you are online now and did not receive the loan of between KSh10,000 and KSh300,000 from Inua Jamii, send the word ‘LOAN’ to the phone number 0759 092480 via SMS or WhatsApp for business, personal, school fees and emergency loans.”
The page has advertised the loan offers on many Facebook groups with thousands of members.
The Inua Jamii programme has often been targeted by fake Facebook accounts and pages that claim to offer loans and cash to Kenyans. Is this another one? We checked.
Identifying a scam
The advert’s poor writing is the first sign that it’s a scam. An official government page wouldn’t publish a post with random capitalisation and missing punctuation marks.
The mix of English and Kiswahili also makes the advert informal, uncharacteristic of a page run by the government.
The Inua Jamii programme does not issue loans but rather gives out cash grants. So no loan offers are posted on the programme’s official Facebook page.
We checked the page’s history through Facebook’s page transparency feature and noted the name of the page has changed a number of times.
It was created on 20 August 2022 under the name “MKOPA KENYA”, perhaps to impersonate M-Kopa, a Kenyan asset financing company. On 24 September, the name changed again to “Hustler Foundation” before changing to its current name “INUA JAMII SOFT LOAN” on 19 November.
We WhatsApped the cellphone number listed in the ads to ask about the loans and were told to deposit a registration fee of KSh1,200 first. This is a clear indication that this is a scam page.
All signs point to a fake Facebook page with scam offers.