Don’t fall for Diwali offers selling iPhones for Rs 99! It’s a scam

Diwali offers keep getting wilder and wilder every year. But if you see an iPhone 13 or Samsung S23 being sold for just Rs 99, or an Oppo smartphone being sold for just Rs 9, you need to pause and tell yourself, “This cannot be real!”
And you would be right to do that. Because this is the tale of a scam that offers just that.

According to these posts going viral, all you need to do to avail these offers is share the Instagram Reel with your friends and enter your personal details on a website named “digital712.com”. Most people would recognise this as obvious fraud. But many, as evident from a number of people sharing their phone numbers in the comments of these posts, still seem to be falling for it.
India Today Fact Check looked into the websites being promoted through these reels and found that the people running them could have a Rajasthan connection. Let’s look at how we got there.
Old scam, new bottle
In the Reels going viral, an AI-generated voice prompts you to visit the website digital712.com. This is also linked to the bios of the Instagram accounts sharing them.
On the website, you’ll be asked to click on a link to get a free smartphone. You’ll then be asked to choose from options like the iPhone 13, the Samsung S23, or the Vivo V27. Next, you’ll be asked for whom you want to make this purchase.

The website also advertises free phone recharge offers. If you try to avail them, you’re asked for personal details like your phone number. This is a common modus operandi for data harvesting scams.

If you try to buy a smartphone or avail the recharge offers through digital712.com, you’ll gradually be redirected to two different portals: earnwithfaith.in and go.sapost.co.in. The actual websites are not linked here, only their archives. All three have a similar look and feel and feature articles focussing on money-making tricks, government schemes, and offers.
It’s worth noting that after you enter your personal details in an attempt to buy these heavily discounted smartphones, the page simply refreshes. There is no actual way to buy the phones advertised there. This is just a data harvesting scam.

Email trail
In the “About us” section of digital712.com, we found an email address. Saving this address to Outlook led us to the LinkedIn account connected to it. This person’s LinkedIn bio claimed he was a teacher in Bikaner, Rajasthan.
We looked up the school listed on LinkedIn and contacted its owner. They confirmed to India Today Fact Check that the name given on the LinkedIn account was indeed a member of the faculty there. Through the school’s owner, we reached the teacher in question.
He denied any link with these websites, the email listed in the “About us” section, or the LinkedIn account linked to this email. We asked him to send us the link to his original LinkedIn account. While he initially agreed to do so, he later said that he deleted the account — allegedly because it wasn’t helping him find work. Interestingly, when we checked after speaking to him, the LinkedIn account we had discovered had been deleted.
More Rajasthan links
In the “About us” section of the website earnwithfaith.in, we found another email. When we searched for this email on Google, we found Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts linked to it. As per the information given on these accounts, the person operating them appeared to be a musician. Looking at his photographs, we felt that he could also be a minor. Hence, we are not revealing any information about him.
We also went through the pictures he shared on Snapchat and found that one of the images of a dolphin statue is from the Surpura Safari Park in Jodhpur.

Similarly, in another image, a Starbucks QR Code was visible. On scanning this code, we were led to the menu page of the Starbucks outlet at Jodhpur Park Plaza.

We noticed that one of the viral posts contained a phone number. When we searched for this phone number on Truecaller, it revealed the location as Rajasthan.

There is a whole network of Instagram pages promoting these scam websites. Some of these accounts are mobilemela_offers, paisa__kamao7, and divya.tech. They even collaborate amongst themselves to promote such posts.
To sum up, a network of scam websites are trying to sell non-existent cheap smartphone deals to people to essentially harvest their data.