Claim: A Viral post with links on social media platforms claims that Ecobank Ghana is giving 500 Ghana cedis to customers who participate in a survey to mark the bank’s 40th anniversary.
Ghana says no survey is being conducted to celebrate any anniversary.
Full Text
A post making the rounds on some social media platforms, mainly WhatsApp, claims that Ecobank Ghana is giving out 500 Ghana cedis and other prizes randomly to people who fill out a survey.
The post, captioned “Ecobank 40th Anniversary”, urges interested customers to use this link to take part in a survey. When users follow the link, it leads them to some websites with the logo of Ecobank Ghana. The site uses prompts to urge unsuspecting individuals to redeem cash prizes from the bank. A number of comments can be seen by people claiming to be winners.
“Today, you have been chosen to participate in our survey. It will only take you a minute and you will receive a fantastic prize! Each week we randomly choose 100 customers to give them a chance to win 500 Cedi! There will be 100 lucky winners. This survey aims to improve the quality of service for our customers and your participation will be rewarded 100%. You only have 4 minutes and 16 seconds to answer this survey! Hurry up, the number of prizes available is limited!,” the purported link for Ecobank Ghana reads.
People are required to fill out four questions including whether they know Ecobank, their age, what is their perception of Ecobank Ghana’s service and their gender.
After the answers are verified, they are congratulated and given three attempts and asked to choose their prize from 9 similar objects to get a chance to win those prizes.
What makes this claim peculiar is how the link was highly similar to the original ecobank website link. Typing www.ecobank.com takes you to the original ecobank website. This makes it quite believable and therefore necessary to fact-check.
Verification
The website of Ecobank Ghana indicates that the bank was incorporated in January, 1989, celebrated its 30th Anniversary in 2020, thereby making it impossible for the bank to celebrate its 40th Anniversary in 2021.
After speaking to a Customer Service Personnel at the bank, Dubawa was able to confirm that the post circulating is false. According to the Customer Service Person, Ecobank Ghana is not 40 years old and the bank has not sent out any survey to reward customers on the occasion of the said anniversary and such information should be disregarded.
Conclusion
Ecobank Ghana is not 40 years old and the viral survey link is not from the bank. It is false and should be ignored. The official Ecobank Ghana website is https://ecobank.com/gh/personal-banking/countries
This report was produced under the Dubawa Student Fact-checking Project aimed at offering students in tertiary schools aspiring to take up roles in the profession the opportunity to acquire real-world experience through verification and fact-checking.
