On Aug. 22, a website published a fraudulent announcement that mothers would receive P10,000 from President Rodrigo Duterte, deceiving several netizens on Facebook (FB).
Blogspot website KBS WORLD TV posted the fake statement which read: “MGA INA TATANGGAP NG 10K PESOS MULA SA PANGULO (Mothers will receive P10,000 from the president).” The website is not the Korean television channel, nor is it connected to it.
Several FB pages and groups urged netizens to go to the phoney article, further claiming that the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) would also provide cash aid to all mothers in the entire country.
The national government is extending until Aug. 31 its distribution of cash aid worth P1,000 to P4,000 to 10.8 million individuals in the National Capital Region (NCR). But neither Duterte nor the DSWD has announced a separate financial assistance scheme for mothers.
VERA Files Fact Check debunked earlier this month a similar claim by a bogus YouTube channel posing as a DSWD account that single mothers would be given cash assistance.
To make the post look legitimate, the spurious article copied a paragraph from Sen. Christopher Bong Go’s Aug. 3 FB post about Duterte’s decision to approve funds for the distribution of cash aid to 80% of NCR’s population. Nowhere in Go’s post was there any mention of distributing P10,000 for mothers.
Unaware that the article is a sham, some netizens wrote their full name and contact details on the comments section of the website article and the FB posts.
KBS WORLD TV blog site also carries fake articles urging users to click on links for cash giveaways but these are scams and they carry the names of a popular senator and money remittance services. Blogger profile M.siem news and upadate (sic), which emerged in August 2020, created the impostor site. It also handles three other pages hosting scams and fake giveaways.
The bogus article garnered almost 7,300 FB interactions, and could have reached nearly 1.3 million people, according to social media monitoring tool CrowdTangle. Top traffic generators include FB page Philippines News TALK, as well as FB groups DSWD UPDATE and 10k AYUDA BILL UPDATE 2021.
It emerged the same day Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles denied on Aug. 22 that NCR was downgraded to modified enhanced community quarantine status due to lack of funds.
DSWD UPDATE, which pretends to be a legitimate DSWD account, was created in September 2020. Philippines News TALK, which uses DSWD’s logo as its profile picture, emerged in March 2021, while 10k AYUDA BILL UPDATE 2021 was created last May 2021.
