In the age of the Internet, smartphone technology, and social media, there is one constant that ties them all together. People will use them to scam you, trick you, and troll you. And that's true no matter the gravity of the situation, as evidence by this latest instance.
Earlier today, the Indian government decided to repeal Article 370 of the constitution, that gave special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. And it was only a couple of hours after that people began receiving messages like this in their inbox.
Yeah, that's supposedly an offer of incredibly cheap real estate, now that the law barring outsiders from buying local property has been scrapped.
When we called the number, it turned out to be linked to a real estate firm called Eden Realty, specifically a project of theirs called Solaris. Not only is this real estate firm based on Kolkata, the project in question only exists at four locations around West Bengal. Unfortunately, we were greeted by a robocall menu and no human picked up the phone.
That, plus the fact that this messages began spreading almost immediately after the order was passed, indicates that this was a fake message.It's likely because of this the company was not picking up calls on this number. The original creator was either using badly-framed sarcasm to complain about the government action, was looking to troll people, or wanted to further spark anger in the local Kasmir community and elsewhere.?
And as low as that is, it's actually the better possibility to consider. Because what this could also be is a scam.
The lack of an attached URL (probably to a malware download) and the fact that the number is of a real company indicates this might not be the case, but it's still scary. After all, it would just take a small tweak to turn this into a full-blown fraud.
Simply replace the number in the message and it's now a phone scam tricking gullible buyers into putting down deposits on non-existent land in Kashmir. Add a link to a malware-infected server and you have a fast-spreading virus.
Take this image for instance, which was also found circulating online. If you look closely, you can tell the poster has been poorly edited to make the details Kashmir-relevant. Is it also a joke or an actual scam? that's hard to tell.
So while people have been sharing this online in light of the Indian government's scrapping of Article 370 in Kashmir, it could only be a matter of time before messages like this are being shared with police as evidence in a scam-related case.
These kind of lucrative scams have happened before multiple times, and it will happen again. It's just another reminder guys, you need to be vigilant about things you see online and people share with you. Don't count on other people to do your research for you.