The Kenyan lender has distanced itself from the page.
This Facebook page purportedly belonging to Equity Bank’s Wings to Fly programme and offering scholarship application guidance is FAKE.
The Wings to Fly scholarship programme is an Equity Group and Mastercard Foundation (MCF) initiative, which supports secondary education for top-performing students from financially challenged backgrounds.
The page ‘Wings to fly EquityBank’ uses the Wings to Fly logo and had 131 likes and 268 followers as of 6 December 2023.
The page intro reads: “The Wings to Fly scholarship program, an initiative of the Equity Group and Mastercard Foundation.”
The page has made several posts such as this, offering scholarship application guidance to prospective applicants.
According to its transparency information section, the page was created on 11 August 2023 as ‘wings to fly Equity Bank’ and renamed ‘Wings to fly EquityBank’ on the same date.
But is the page authentic?
To start with, the page has several inconsistencies. For instance, it was created four months ago, yet the Wings to Fly programme has existed since 2010.
Moreover, the email address on the page uses a Gmail domain, equitywingstofly@gmail.com, while the official email for Equity Bank Foundation, which runs the Wings to Fly programme, is support@equitygroupfoundation.org
We searched for Wings to Fly on Facebook and established that several pages use that name, but none is verified.
PesaCheck contacted Equity Bank Kenya on X (formerly Twitter) and established that the page is fake.
“The page is fake. We have asked our security team to facilitate a takedown. The Wings To Fly applications can only be submitted via the link below or through our branch nearby and it’s free of charge,” the bank said.
We checked Equity Bank’s verified X account and Facebook page for news on 2023 Wings to Fly scholarships and established that the application portal was opened on 4 December 2023. However, the account under investigation had been making posts on the scholarship days before it was opened.
PesaCheck examined a Facebook page claiming to belong to Equity Bank’s Wings to Fly programme and offering scholarship application guidance and found it to be FAKE.
