Claim: Dubai will give individuals 50,000 dirhams if they give birth to babies.
Fact: The posts making this claim are a scam.
A Facebook user shared a reel (archive) of a Geo News’ bulletin where the anchor reports that Dubai’s government has offered to pay individuals who give birth to children. The text in the video reads, “Get 50,000 Dirham, make children.”
The news anchor makes the announcement in Urdu. Soch Fact Check has translated it in English as follows:
“In Dubai, you will get 40 lac rupees, meaning 50,000 dirhams giving birth to children. Due to many visitors coming to Dubai and the shortage of births, they have started a new program in which the government will give a house and one girl. You only have to give birth to babies. The more children you give birth to, the higher the salary.”
The video then cuts to the Google search engine interface, with “mizmaxs” typed in the search bar. Then, the anchor’s voiceover says: “ To apply, type [mizmaxs] and visit the first website, and click on the first application. Below you will find the option to apply.”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check analysed the video and found that the post is a scam.
Conducting keyword searches did not yield reports by Geo News about this project, which was apparently announced by the UAE or Dubai government.
However, the UAE has social welfare programs for its low-income citizens targeting “Emirati families” whose salary is less than AED 25,000 monthly. The program was introduced in 2022, and covers “housing allowance, university education allowance, allowance for unemployed citizens over the age of 45 and allowance for unemployed job-seekers.” The program also includes increasing “existing allowances allocated to families.”
Moreover, over the last few months, UAE’s government has declined visas for Pakistanis who could not prove they had enough money in their accounts and were “genuine” visitors, according to Dawn. Travellers to the UAE would need to be vetted by the police. This resulted from growing concerns by the UAE authorities that beggars, who disguise themselves as visitors, were from Pakistan. Therefore, it is unlikely the UAE government announced this scheme for Pakistanis.
Additionally, we suspected the video had been tampered with in some way because the news anchor’s lip movements are not in sync with the audio. So we ran the audio through a deepfake detection tool on InVid, and the tool stated that the fragment was “ very likely AI-generated” with a 99% likelihood.
Besides, when the video showed “mizmaxs” typed into the Google search engine at timestamp 0:22, we were led to suspect that it is a scam. Soch Fact Check has previously debunked scam posts featuring Geo News and a video asking individuals to visit a website called ‘Mizmaxs’. In both cases, the posts were scams which lured individuals to click on fraudulent links.
In this instance, too, we analysed the article shown in the video by Mizmaxs but did not find any links to an application process.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes the post is false.
Virality
The Facebook reel was liked 18,200 times and shared 483 times.
On Instagram, it appeared here, here, here.
Conclusion: Posts claiming that the Dubai government is offering 50,000 dirhams to individuals giving birth to children are a scam.
Background image in cover photo: Emirati Times
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