If a message offers you Rs. 13,000 from the Prime Minister for Iqbal Day, it is a scam. NCCIA, Pakistan’s cyber crime agency, says the links behind those offers are fake and exist to harvest personal information, and it wants the public to ignore them.
Iqbal Day falls on 9 November, and the government has declared it a public holiday, which gives scammers a date to hang the offer on. The agency says criminals are using misleading messages, fake links and invented announcements, and it asks people to do four things: do not open the links, do not forward messages you cannot verify, do not give personal or financial details to unknown senders, and check any announcement through official government channels.
The same Rs. 13,000 offer is not new. In August, National CERT warned about SMS and WhatsApp messages promising Rs. 13,000 for Independence Day, and told recipients to delete them and block the sender. Only the occasion has changed, from Independence Day to Iqbal Day. The advice that came with that warning still applies: a payout that arrives as a link in a chat is not something the government sends, and anyone who has already tapped one should stop there and not enter a CNIC number, bank details or a one-time password.
The agency’s own channels are the place to confirm anything that claims to come from it.
NCCIA has not said how many people have received the messages or whether anyone has lost money to them, and the warning, as reported, names no phone numbers or websites behind the offer.
