Congress has managed to embarrass itself again over ‘Donate for Desh’ campaign it has been running since last month. This time the embarrassment is much more serious because the party has ended up promoting a fake website that looked almost similar to the official campaign website, but where money went to someone else instead of to the Congress party.
On Wednesday (10 January 2024), Indian National Congress released a special pamphlet ahead of Rahul Gandhi’s upcoming ‘Bharat Nyay Yatra’. In the pamphlet, QR code and URL of the ‘Donate for Desh’ website was also mentioned, except that both were wrong. URL of the official ‘Donate for Desh’ campaign is donateinc.in, but on the pamphlet, donateinc.co.in was printed and the same was used in the QR code too.
Coincidently or not, on donateinc.co.in, which is the wrong address, a website exists that has copied most of the text, images, and style from the official and ‘correct’ crowdfunding website of the Congress.
Evidently it is a fake website deliberately targeted to scam people looking to donate to the Congress party. If a person is not alert enough, he would think that the money is going to the Congress party, but in reality, it goes to unknown people. The fake website (still active at the time of publishing this report) is accepting donations only via UPI apps.
Since the QR code and URL were given by the Congress party in an official document i.e. a pamphlet promoting Rahul Gandhi’s upcoming yatra, users would not suspect the website to be fake because it had copied almost everything from the official website. A user has to be extra alert only at the time of completing the transaction to notice that the money is going somewhere else.
Following image shows how it looked to the end user, on Google Pay, at the end time of making a donation to the Congress – the top message says one is paying to the ‘Indian National Congress’, but the banking name below gives away that it is scam because it says “Roj Cash”.
However, not everyone will be alert to notice it and suspect a foul play because they landed up on the website after scanning a QR code from an official document given by the Congress party. Media reports claim that Congress has already lost lakhs of rupees because of this mistake.
A simple google search suggests that there are some apps named “Roj Cash” that promise players money if they download, sign up, and undertake some activities. It can’t be said with certainty that this fake website intended to scam Congress supporters has been created by owners of such apps. What can be said with certainty is that it is a pure scam and many Congress supporters would have lost money.
Interestingly, the Congress party has not expressed as much anguish and complaint over such scam websites running that are literally deceiving people into believing that they are donating to the party, as they had done when they had to face embarrassment at the launch of the campaign when they had failed to book domains like donatefordesh.org and donatefordesh.com
It should be noted that on the former occasion, a user was not being scammed or deceived because the domains redirected to an altogether different website that showed nothing related to the Congress party, while the current fake website appears like an official Congress website.
Publicly available information shows that this fake website was booked by someone claiming to be from Rajasthan on 19th December 2023, which is just a day after the ‘Donate for Desh’ campaign was officially launched by the Congress party.
Despite this being a clear case of deliberate scamming, the Congress party hasn’t yet announced that it would file a police complaint against the scamsters. Nor it is clear that how did the party end up including a scamming website’s address in their official campaign document.