Girl Scamming People Through Online Payment? Video is Scripted
The video aims to spread awareness about cyber fraud in online payments and is not a real incident.
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In a viral video, a man appears to confront a girl in a shop at the shopkeeper's behest, as he complains that she scams them and does not pay for her purchases.
The man recording the video unearths an alleged scam, showing that the girl uses a dummy online payments application on her smartphone, which mimics a successful transaction's screen.
The video went viral, as people shared it to warn others, especially business owners, to exercise caution while receiving payment online.
However, this is yet another 'awareness video' created to educate people. The original video has a section at the end where its creator states that it is one.
The Quint has debunked several other such awareness or educational videos that have been shared as real incident.s
CLAIM
The video is being shared to claim that the girl in the video was committing fraud by scamming the shop owners of their money and was caught red-handed.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Using InVID, a video verification tool, we divided the video into multiple frames and ran reverse image searches on some of them. The results led us to a YouTube video uploaded on 5 January that was longer than the videos in the claim.
Towards the end of this video, a man speaks to the viewers in Hindi, saying that the video was made to spread awareness and that people who deal with online payment should not believe screenshots they may receive.
This portion of the video carried text that reads 'Nishant Soni'.
The text on the screen reads 'Nishant Soni'.
(Source: YouTube/Screenshot)
Taking a clue from this, we used keywords such as 'Nishant Soni online payments fraud' and came across a post on a Facebook page called 'NS ki Duniya' which carried a better quality video.
A comment by the page on this video led us to Nishant Soni's Instagram account, where the video was shared as an awareness video.
The caption states that it is an awareness video.
(Source: Instagram/Altered by The Quint)
Clearly, a video created to spread awareness about online payments and how one should exercise caution to prevent fraud is being shared as a video of a real incident.
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