Congress has managed to embarrass itself again over the ‘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 the Congress party.
On Wednesday, January 10, 2024, the Indian National Congress released a special pamphlet ahead of Rahul Gandhi’s upcoming ‘Bharat Nyay Yatra’. In the pamphlet, the QR code and URL of the ‘Donate for Desh’ website were also mentioned, except that both were wrong. The URL of the official ‘Donate for Desh’ campaign is donating.in, but on the pamphlet, donateinc.co.in was printed, and the same was used in the QR code too. Coincidentally or not, on donateinc.co.in, which is the wrong address, a website exists that has copied all 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. The following image shows how it looked to the end user on Google Pay at the end 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 a scam because it says “Roj Cash”. However, not everyone will be alert enough 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 the 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.
According to information that is readily available, someone posing as a Rajasthani booked this fake website on December 19, 2023, just one day after the Congress party’s ‘Donate for Desh’ campaign had its official launch. 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 is it clear how the party ended up including a scam website’s address in their official campaign document.
