Rashtriya Sikhshit Berozgaar Yojna: A Phishing Scam, Not A Govt Scheme

A site named Rashtriya Sikhshit Berojgar Yojna, to help those who are educated and unemployed, is fake and a scam disguised as a fake government of India scheme. 
 
BOOM found that there is no such scheme started by the government and the site is a phishing scheme to access people's details, documents and scam them into paying a fee.

The website (rsby.org) and Facebook page have since been taken down. The Facebook page was created in February 2020 as the coronavirus began spreading throughout the world. On March 24, 2020, PM Narendra Modi announced a 21-day lockdown to combat the spread of COVID-19 and the lockdown was extended for a further two weeks from May 4, 2020. The archives of the website and Facebook page can be found here and here.

A Twitter user reached out to the Government asking whether the site was authentic.

BOOM went through the site and found several discrepancies in the information. An analysis showed that the website, while disguised as an authentic site, did not match with the other government sites. We also looked at the official database of the government and found no such reports about a scheme called - 'Rashtriya Sikshit Berozgaar Yojana'.

Fact Check

The first discrepancy about the website was in the url. All government-run websites have a gov.in or nic.in domain. However, the website of the 'Rashtriya Sikhshit Berojgar Yojna' (www.rsby.org) has a .org domain. Moreover, the website uses a .php language whereas government websites use .html language.

BOOM Live accessed the Government of India's web directory to search for any official records of a website under Rashtriya Sikhshit Berojgar Yojna. BOOM ran searches with the keyword 'Rashtriya Sikhshit Berojgar Yojna' as well as the url 'rsby.org'. The search came up with no results. Below are the screenshots of the search.

The Facebook page of the site was created on February 16, 2020 and the Facebook page transparency option showed that the location of those who run the page as - Pakistan 

Posts on the Facebook page state that the scheme is applicable only to 40,000 citizens on a first come first serve basis. The government does not offer any scheme on a first come first serve basis.

We then looked through the site and found a section titled 'media' which features newspaper clippings about the scheme. A close look at the clippings showed that the newspapers were not named, and the place where the name of the scheme appeared did not match with the rest of the newspaper layout.

In most of the clippings, the words, Rashtriya Sikhshit Berojgar Yojna had been photoshopped, with the text of the article deliberately blurred, so a reader would be unable to read the contents. 

The design and layout of logo and national emblem used on www.rsby.org don't follow the norms. Government websites have the designated ministry's title written under the national emblem. The www.rsby.org site only has a logo and a standalone national emblem.

The website seems to be a phishing site which requires users to pay a registration fee as well as upload Aadhar card and share their bank account details. Once the applicant pays a fee of Rs 250 by transferring the money through online banking to a Syndicate Bank account, they would be required to post a copy of the receipt along with their bank account details, a scanned copy of their signature and a copy of their Aadhar card.

The website also has many inconsistencies with regards to language as well as information shared. The image of the logo is compressed.

The url of the coronavirus information tab spells corona as 'carona'. The website is also rife with grammatical errors like incorrect sentence structuring and basic spelling errors.

In the 'Contact Us' tab, the website offers 'Goverment Of India New Delhi – 110056' where 'government' is misspelled. Moreover, the pin code is of Shakurbasti in New Delhi which does not house any central government office. The website also states that it is maintained by the '@Computer Department,Rashtriya Sikshit Berojgar Yojna'. Government websites are maintained by the National Informatics Centre.

 The Press Information Bureau's factchecking team put out a tweet calling the website fake and clarified that there was no such scheme by the Government of India.