This Facebook page offering online investment opportunities in the name of Opera News Nigeria is FAKE.

Opera News is a localised news app that shares multimedia content. It has operations in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.

The page with the username “Opera New Nigeria” utilises the media company’s logo and purports to provide a networking programme called Rolvi Trading, which claims to enable Nigerians invest and generate returns.

The page has posts such as this one promising that individuals who invest on the platform will get double returns within two hours. According to the post, the returns from the programme are meant to assist the less privileged and reduce unemployment rate in the country.

The page’s transparency information indicates that it was created on 30 June 2023. This is a red flag.

Based on the glaring red flag, PesaCheck sought to authenticate the page’s legitimacy.

We contacted Collins Udeme, team lead at Opera News Nigeria, who disowned the page and shared the organisation’s legitimate Facebook page.

The genuine page was created in January 2019 and had amassed over 141,000 followers as of 13 July 2023.

At registration, the page went by Abuja News — Opera News but was renamed Opera News Abuja and later Opera News Nigeria.

There is no mention of any investment opportunity on the authentic Opera News Nigeria Facebook page.

PesaCheck examined a Facebook page offering online investment opportunities in the name of Opera News Nigeria and found it to be FAKE.

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 Rodgers Omondi 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, visit pesacheck.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.