Reasons why I think ‘Freedom 251’ is a scam
This is regarding a recent news that got front-page coverage in a lot of local newpapers in India about a ₹251.00 (USD 4) phone.
1: This website was created just yesterday (Feb 17th)
archive.org website has a copy of every website in the internet. With it, you can go back in time and see how a website looked like 5 years or 10 years back. With it, you can know when a company’s website was first made online, and how it looked like in the past.
I tried searching ringingbells.co.in in archive.org and found that they had only one copy of the website, and that was on 17th Feb. Super fishy!!! The company creates its website just one day before they get front-page newspaper coverage? It is shitty on all news media to not do their research before publishing so called “news” online and on print.
link on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20160215000000*/http://ringingbells.co.in/
2: The website’s name was registered in August 2015
I did some more lookup on when the domain name ringingbells.co.in was purchased using https://www.whois.net/ website. Turns out this website name purchased on 4th August 2015 and is set to expire on 4th August 2017. A company with such great dreams of changing lives of millions of people only buys a domain name with 2 years validity?
3: Their 1-day old website boasts of 3 other phones that the company has made. Clicking on ‘Buy now’ on those phones gives a message: “Thank you India for the overwhelming response. We are sold out in 72 hours. Bookings will be open soon”.
- How does a company that was online for just 1 day claim to have sold out all three products in just 72 hours?
- If their products were so hot that they all sold out in 72-hours, how did they not get news coverage previously? And why are we hearing about this company only now?
link: http://ringingbells.co.in/
4: They use words like ‘this is the best example of Modiji’s “make in India” idea’ that anyone who is patriotic will fall for it.
5: ₹251 is too small an amount that people will just forget it and let it go if they don’t get the phone. It is too small an amount for people to go fight for it. But the amount they would make if millions of people fall for the scam and pay for it is HUGE!
6: and people who think ₹251 is a huge investment to do are too powerless to give a fight when the scam is revealed. They won’t know who to talk to or where to complain. Given that everyone who can afford to loose ₹251 don’t make an issue out of it, the poor have no choice but to accept that their money is lost and they can’t do anything about it.
Please don’t support this scam!
PS: I originally posted it in a reddit discussion here but the thread wasn’t getting enough attention as it should. Please upvote and share to tell people about the scam.
