A video claiming Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy launched an AI-based trading platform to "help Indians have a stable passive income" is fake and part of a phishing scam.
The video shows Murthy talking to press persons with an overlaid audio claiming he has launched a new trading platform.
The post hyperlinks to a webpage, which is designed to look like a news story by the Indian Express, with the headline "JUST IN: Narayana Murti unveils his secret to enrich ordinary Indians." The article, which carries a photo of Murthy, talks about how he invested "$3.000.000" and founded a new trading platform called "BTC iPlex Ai". It then goes on to talk about the benefits one can avail of signing up on the platform.
The video is being shared with the caption, "Iplex AI has already changed the lives of many other Indians who, by investing just Rs 25,000, have received Rs 100,750 in income in their bank account within a week."
We also found another Facebook post talking about the same platform and Murthy, shared on a page that gives out investment advice.
FACT CHECK
BOOM found that the video is fake and is part of a phishing scam that impersonates news articles to make it look like a verified article.
We first went through the video and noticed that it had the logo of Business Today, the business magazine of India Today and that Narayana Murthy was wearing a lanyard with NASSCOM written on it.
Using this, we ran a keyword search for "Business Today Narayana Murthy NASSCOM" and found the same video uploaded on YouTube by the verified channel of Business Today.
The video was uploaded on March 3, 2023 with the title, "This Is What N R Narayana Murthy Feels Is A New-Age Ponzi Scheme". In the video, Murthy is not talking about a new trading platform but the current state of the startup industry globally and in India.
We compared the audio of Murthy speaking in the original video with the audio in the viral video and found that they did not match. The voice and what is being said are both different. We have have reached out to experts to determine if the audio is a deepfake
We then went through the Indian Express story hyperlinked to the viral video and found that it was fake and only designed to look like a news story by the outlet.
The style and language of the viral article does not match that of an actual Indian Express story. Additionally, the article has several spelling and grammatical errors including spelling his last name, Murthy as Murti.
The URL of the article does not match the URL of the news outlet Indian Express. The URL in the viral article is "new-indianexpress.com" while the original is https://indianexpress.com/
A search for new-indianexpress.com on Whois showed that it was registered in 2023 itself to someone in Iceland.
A search for Bitcoin iPlex App did not lead to any news stories or verified articles linking it to Infosys or Narayana Murthy.
