This website claiming to offer the 2023 United States of America (USA) Visa Lottery is a hoax.

According to the website, the offer is for 35,000 student visas, 20,000 dependant visas, 80,000 work and study visas, and 55,000 job visas.

The visa particulars include “no application fee, instant work permit, free accommodation, monthly allowances, work and study permit”.

Applicants are required to fill in their personal details.

After providing the details, users are redirected to another page where they have to validate their names before proceeding to the next step. Thereafter, applicants should fill in their full names and the kind of visa they would like.

We selected “Permanent Residence Visas” and we were thereafter informed that we had qualified for the final stage of the American visa lottery enrollment.

However, a message appeared, saying that we have to share the form with five groups or 15 friends on WhatsApp by clicking on the “share” button. The page promises to redirect you to the “Visa Form” page once the green bar is full.

“Your Visa Sponsorship Has Been Successful and Your Salary Has Been Allocated,” users are notified.

PesaCheck was then given the option to either print a working visa, student visa, or both. We decided to click on both and were redirected to a blog dubbed “allcomicbook.com”, which has nothing to do with American visas.

To confirm whether the website belongs to the US Visa Lottery, we pasted the website link on Whois.com and established that the website is registered under the domain name “rodasu.com”. It was registered by “123-Reg Limited” on 24 August 2022 in the US.

After searching the phrase “US Visa Lottery” on Google, we came across a US government website dubbed “Diversity Visa Program”. According to Whois.com, the domain is registered under “STATE.GOV”. The other details about the website are not available.

The department, according to the DVP website, falls under the U.S. Department of State — Bureau of Consular Affairs. To apply for the Diversity Immigration Visa, one is required to visit the “Electronic Diversity Visa Program” page.

Both Diversity Visa 2024 and Diversity Visa 2023 are closed. DV-2024 closed on 8 November 2022 while DV-2023 closed on 9 November 2021.

PesaCheck has looked into a website claiming to offer the 2023 US Visa Lottery and found it to be a SCAM.

This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.

Have you spotted what you think is fake or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.

This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Naomi Wanjiku and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.

The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck managing editor Doreen Wainainah.

PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visitpesacheck.org.

PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.