IMAGE: Namibia Fact Check / WhatsApp
A months-old phishing scam luring people with fake job opportunities at an international agency is circulating again on WhatsApp
The anonymous WhatsApp post, which includes a link, falsely claims that UNICEF is mass recruiting and guarantees 100% job placement.
The message was forwarded to Namibia Fact Check on 16 July 2024 for verification. It reads as follows (image below):
“APPLY FOR UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN’S FUND(UNICEF) MASSIVE RECRUITMENT 2024 JANUARY INTAKES.
Click on the link below to start your registration.
All Nationalities are eligible to Apply irrespective of your Tribe, Age or Sex.
APPLY HERE
Note that UNICEF does not charge any fee at any stage of recruitment process.
Employment is 100% Guaranteed.
Please share to Interested Individuals.”
The link in the post, which is still active, redirects users to a seemingly legitimate UNICEF webpage (image below) that requests personal information such as title, full name, phone number, email address, nationality, and current job.
On a following webpage users are prompted to provide their marital status, level of education, and field of work. You can only proceed by filling in the marital status, which “automatically qualifies you to work at UNICEF”.
As is expected with such baiting and phishing scams, users are then required to share the link in five WhatsApp groups or with 15 people, which supposedly triggers a successful application via email confirmation.
The Facts
Similar posts have circulated in social media spaces in other countries as well over recent years.
UNICEF Uganda and Tanzania both posted on their respective Facebook pages on 23 May 2023, stating that the recruitment message was fake. Following this, PesaCheck confirmed on 26 May 2023 that UNICEF was not mass recruiting and that the job advertisement is a hoax.
The current webpage linked in the message was first indexed by Google three months ago, indicating that it is relatively new.
UNICEF Namibia’s communications specialist Judi Matjila has confirmed to Namibia Fact Check that there is no mass recruitment being done by UNICEF, and there are no 100% guaranteed job placements.
Namibians are encouraged to search for job advertisements on UNICEF’s global careers website to verify if recruitment advertisements are real, instead of sharing personal information via suspicious links and webpages.