Hoax post falsely claims Canada offers free travel, jobs for Ethiopians and Eritreans
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on September 5, 2023 at 14:55
- 2 min read
- By Tolera FIKRU GEMTA, AFP Ethiopia
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
"Exciting news from the Canadian government. The Canadian government has issued a new statement that will allow 40,000 Ethiopians and Eritreans in Canada free travel and work," reads part of the post.
"According to the statement, any Ethiopian or Eritrean citizen must meet the following requirements: age 20 years and above; national ID; graduated from 10th grade. The Canadian government will cover all costs of those who register and meet these requirements," it adds.
The post has been shared more than 290 times since being published on July 1, 2023.
It advises readers to follow several attached links, which purportedly direct them to the official website of the Canadian government to out online applications.
A similar post was published on Facebook on August 30, 2023.
However the Canadian government is not offering any such programme.
Scam post
Contacted by AFP Fact Check, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) department confirmed that the claim was unfounded.
"The claim is incorrect; no such programme exists," IRCC spokesman Loïc Ouellette said. "IRCC urges clients to use the official departmental website to obtain information about its programmes in order to avoid becoming victims of fraud."
AFP Fact Check reviewed the links attached to the post published in July 2023. They do not lead to any Canadian government sites, but to an error page on the web domain "hd.kbibleverse.com", which is also unavailable.
TikTok video
Meanwhile, the links attached to the similar post shared in August 2023 lead to a TikTok video (archived here) shared by an account with over 36,000 followers. The clip’s narrator, in Amharic, simply repeats the same false claim.
The video includes time-lapse footage of people walking in a street and Canadian flags seen waving from above.
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes of the footage. Using the results, we found that the video was originally published by a website featuring free videos about Canada (archived here). The footage was captioned "National Day of Canada" in French.
None of the links provided were affiliated with the Canadian government.
AFP Fact Check previously debunked similar posts that promised free travel and job opportunities in Canada and US here and here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
