#FactCheck: Viral Fake Post Claims Central Government Offers Unemployment Allowance Under ‘PM Berojgari Bhatta Yojna’
Executive Summary:
A viral thumbnail and numerous social posts state that the government of India is giving unemployed youth ₹4,500 a month under a program labeled "PM Berojgari Bhatta Yojana." This claim has been shared on multiple online platforms.. It has given many job-seeking individuals hope, however, when we independently researched the claim, there was no verified source of the scheme or government notification.
Claim:
The viral post states: "The Central Government is conducting a scheme called PM Berojgari Bhatta Yojana in which any unemployed youth would be given ₹ 4,500 each month. Eligible candidates can apply online and get benefits." Several videos and posts show suspicious and unverified website links for registration, trying to get the general public to share their personal information.
Fact check:
In the course of our verification, we conducted a research of all government portals that are official, in this case, the Ministry of Labour and Employment, PMO India, MyScheme, MyGov, and Integrated Government Online Directory, which lists all legitimate Schemes, Programmes, Missions, and Applications run by the Government of India does not posted any scheme related to the PM Berojgari Bhatta Yojana.
Numerous YouTube channels seem to be monetizing false narratives at the expense of sentiment, leading users to misleading websites. The purpose of these scams is typically to either harvest data or market pay-per-click ads that suspend disbelief in outrageous claims.
Our research findings were backed up later by the PIB Fact Check which shared a clarification on social media. stated that: “No such scheme called ‘PM Berojgari Bhatta Yojana’ is in existence. The claim that has gone viral is fake”.
To provide some perspective, in 2021-22, the Rajasthan government launched a state-level program under the Mukhyamantri Udyog Sambal Yojana (MUSY) that provided ₹4,500/month to unemployed women and transgender persons, and ₹4000/month to unemployed males. This was not a Central Government program, and the current viral claim falsely contextualizes past, local initiatives as nationwide policy.
Conclusion:
The claim of a ₹4,500 monthly unemployment benefit under the PM Berojgari Bhatta Yojana is incorrect. The Central Government or any government department has not launched such a scheme. Our claim aligns with PIB Fact Check, which classifies this as a case of misinformation. We encourage everyone to be vigilant and avoid reacting to viral fake news. Verify claims through official sources before sharing or taking action. Let's work together to curb misinformation and protect citizens from false hopes and data fraud.
- Claim: A central policy offers jobless individuals ₹4,500 monthly financial relief
- Claimed On: Social Media
- Fact Check: False and Misleading
Related Blogs
Introduction
A message has recently circulated on WhatsApp alleging that voice and video chats made through the app will be recorded, and devices will be linked to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s system from now on. WhatsApp from now, record the chat activities and forward the details to the Government. The Anti-Government News has been shared on social media.
Message claims
- The fake WhatsApp message claims that an 11-point new communication guideline has been established and that voice and video calls will be recorded and saved. It goes on to say that WhatsApp devices will be linked to the Ministry’s system and that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media platforms will be monitored in the future.
- The fake WhatsApp message further advises individuals not to transmit ‘any nasty post or video against the government or the Prime Minister regarding politics or the current situation’. The bogus message goes on to say that it is a “crime” to write or transmit a negative message on any political or religious subject and that doing so could result in “arrest without a warrant.”
- The false message claims that any message in a WhatsApp group with three blue ticks indicates that the message has been noted by the government. It also notifies Group members that if a message has 1 Blue tick and 2 Red ticks, the government is checking their information, and if a member has 3 Red ticks, the government has begun procedures against the user, and they will receive a court summons shortly.
WhatsApp does not record voice and video calls
There has been news which is spreading that WhatsApp records voice calls and video calls of the users. the news is spread through a message that has been recently shared on social media. As per the Government, the news is fake, that WhatsApp cannot record voice and video calls. Only third-party apps can record voice and video calls. Usually, users use third-party Apps to record voice and video calls.
Third-party apps used for recording voice and video calls
- App Call recorder
- Call recorder- Cube ACR
- Video Call Screen recorder for WhatsApp FB
- AZ Screen Recorder
- Video Call Recorder for WhatsApp
Case Study
In 2022 there was a fake message spreading on social media, suggesting that the government might monitor WhatsApp talks and act against users. According to this fake message, a new WhatsApp policy has been released, and it claims that from now on, every message that is regarded as suspicious will have three 3 Blue ticks, indicating that the government has taken note of that message. And the same fake news is spreading nowadays.
WhatsApp Privacy policies against recording voice and video chats
The WhatsApp privacy policies say that voice calls, video calls, and even chats cannot be recorded through WhatsApp because of end-to-end encryption settings. End-to-end encryption ensures that the communication between two people will be kept private and safe.
WhatsApp Brand New Features
- Chat lock feature: WhatsApp Chat Lock allows you to store chats in a folder that can only be viewed using your device’s password or biometrics such as a fingerprint. When you lock a chat, the details of the conversation are automatically hidden in notifications. The motive of WhatsApp behind the cha lock feature is to discover new methods to keep your messages private and safe. The feature allows the protection of most private conversations with an extra degree of security
- Edit chats feature: WhatsApp can now edit your WhatsApp messages up to 15 minutes after they have been sent. With this feature, the users can make the correction in the chat or can add some extra points, users want to add.
Conclusion
The spread of misinformation and fake news is a significant problem in the age of the internet. It can have serious consequences for individuals, communities, and even nations. The news is fake as per the government, as neither WhatsApp nor the government could have access to WhatsApp chats, voice, and video calls on WhatsApp because of end-to-end encryption. End-to-end encryption ensures to protect of the communications of the users. The government previous year blocked 60 social media platforms because of the spreading of Anti India News. There is a fact check unit which identifies misleading and false online content.
Executive Summary:
A video showing a convoy of soldiers travelling on motorcycles is being widely shared on social media with the claim that the personnel were heading towards Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to support the ongoing protest led by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). CyberPeace Research Wing’s research found the claim to be false. The viral video is not related to the CJP protest at Jantar Mantar. The footage predates the ongoing demonstration and is being circulated with a misleading claim.
Claim:
A social media user shared the viral video claiming that soldiers were travelling towards Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to support the youth participating in the CJP protest over issues related to the country’s education system. The post claimed that the soldiers were joining the protest to raise their voice on issues concerning the nation, youth, and their future.
https://x.com/RoflGandhee/status/2079986496556204066?s=20
A reverse image search using Google Lens led the Desk to a video uploaded on a YouTube channel named Commando Journey. Upon comparison, the Desk found that the YouTube video contained the same visuals as the viral video under research. Further verification of the video details revealed that the footage predates the ongoing Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest at Jantar Mantar. The protest, which began in June 2026, has been demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged irregularities in examinations. The video was uploaded on the YouTube channel in February 2026, several months before the CJP protest began, confirming that it has been falsely linked to the recent demonstration.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMvai580gdo
As part of the next phase of the research, the Desk reviewed several other videos uploaded on the same YouTube channel. During the analysis, the Desk identified multiple videos featuring visuals matching those seen in the viral clip. However, these videos were also uploaded before the CJP protest in Delhi, with one of the videos dating back to October 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7eDc9TqOpzM
Conclusion
While the Desk could not independently verify the exact origin and context of the video, the research established that the footage predates the CJP protest and has been falsely linked to the demonstration. Based on the findings, the Desk concluded that the video shared on social media does not show soldiers travelling to Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to support the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest. The footage is unrelated to the ongoing protest and has been circulated with a misleading claim.
On 12 August 2026, President Donald Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber Enabled Crime. Stripped of its bureaucratic packaging, the document does something American law has resisted for three decades: it lets private companies, under close federal supervision, break into the systems of foreign criminal networks and, in some cases, disrupt or damage them.
That is a genuinely large policy shift, even if the memorandum itself is careful, almost defensive, about how it frames the shift. Understanding why requires separating what the text actually authorizes from the "hack back" headline that has attached itself to the story within days of signing.
The problem the memo says it is solving
The White House frames this as a response to scale, not ideology. Americans reported losing more than 20.8 billion dollars to cyber enabled crime in 2025, a sharp jump from the roughly 12.5 billion dollar figure cited when the administration's earlier March 2026 executive order on cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes was signed. Ransomware, phishing, financial fraud, sextortion, and impersonation scams sit at the center of that number, and the administration's own supporting material points to a grim detail buried in the numbers: one in seven young people who experienced sextortion as a minor reported harming themselves as a result.
Those crimes, the memorandum argues, are increasingly the work of organized, transnational groups operating from jurisdictions the FBI simply cannot reach. Domestic law enforcement, built for domestic crime, is structurally mismatched to a threat that lives across borders and inside encrypted infrastructure. The administration's answer is to formally recruit the resource it says is best positioned to close that gap: the American cybersecurity industry itself, which the memo describes as "the most innovative and technologically advanced in the world."
What the Program actually authorizes
The memorandum directs the National Coordination Center, a body first stood up under a 2025 executive order, to build a formal Program through which vetted Participating Companies can conduct two categories of activity against foreign Cyber Enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations, defined in the text as CE TCOs.
Cyber Surveillance Operations cover unauthorized access to a target's systems for the primary purpose of collecting information or intelligence, undertaken with the intent to remain undetected. Cyber Effects Operations go further: manipulating, disrupting, denying, degrading, or destroying information systems, the infrastructure those systems control, or the data resident on them.
Crucially, CE TCOs are defined narrowly. A foreign group only counts if it targets the US government, US persons, or US interests, and it must not be an institutional arm of a foreign state or wholly directed by one. The memo builds in a presumption of innocence at the state level too: a group is assumed not to be state controlled unless clear intelligence establishes otherwise. That distinction matters enormously, because it is the line meant to separate this Program from anything resembling private warfare against a nation state.
No operation happens unilaterally. Every proposed action must be approved in writing by two Program Executive Directors, one designated by the Attorney General and one by the Secretary of Homeland Security, coordinating with each other before signing off. Participating Companies must pass what the memo calls rigorous vetting, sign contractual agreements with DOJ or DHS, and in many cases post a bond or escrow of at least one million dollars, forfeited if they breach their agreement. Within 60 days of the memo's signing, the Program Executive Directors must publish detailed operating procedures covering everything from target adjudication to what happens if an operation accidentally hits a US person's system, in which case the company must stop, run minimization procedures, and immediately notify the Center.
There is also a hard ceiling built into the design. Operations expected to cause loss of life, serious injury, or conduct that would rise to the level of a use of force or armed attack under international law, termed Critical Outcomes in the text, cannot be approved by the Program Executive Directors at all. That ceiling is the memo's clearest attempt to keep this inside the bounds of law enforcement rather than sliding into something closer to conflict.
Multiple law firms tracking the rollout, including Wiley, have been explicit on one point worth repeating because so much coverage has blurred it: this is not a green light for companies to hack back on their own initiative. Every operation remains, on paper, an act of the federal government, merely executed through a contracted private hand.
Why experts are not popping champagne
Legal caution has not stopped a wave of professional anxiety. Cyber policy veterans interviewed by outlets like CyberScoop describe the memo as a genuine philosophical break in how Washington thinks about offense in cyberspace, and the debate that followed split fairly evenly between cautious optimism and open alarm.
The core worry, echoed across nearly every serious critique, is attribution. Cyber operations are hard to trace precisely because criminals exploit shared infrastructure, proxies, and compromised third party systems to hide, and that same fog does not lift just because a government contract sits behind the operator. A former senior CISA official, Michael Garcia, put the risk plainly: pressure to attribute quickly could push companies toward lower certainty judgments about who they are actually striking, with a realistic chance of hitting the wrong server, or worse, infrastructure tied to a foreign government rather than a criminal gang. A former Cyber Command official was blunter still, describing parts of the memo on social media as a structure that could reward companies for manufacturing billable threats rather than resolving them efficiently.
Paul Rosenzweig, a former DHS policy official, raised a separate and arguably more durable problem: jurisdiction. Whatever this memo authorizes under American law, the systems being accessed usually sit inside someone else's sovereign territory, governed by that country's own criminal statutes. Washington cannot legislate away a foreign hacking law simply by calling the American company that broke it a Participating Company.
None of this makes the memo indefensible. Supporters point out, correctly, that the private sector already does enormous amounts of active defense and threat disruption work informally, through botnet takedown litigation and coordinated infrastructure seizures, and that formalizing federal oversight over that activity is arguably safer than the current improvisation. The honest position, and probably the fair one, is that the memo trades one set of risks for another, and which set turns out worse will depend entirely on the operating procedures due inside sixty days, procedures the public has not yet seen.
CyberPeace Insights: what this means beyond America's borders
A significant share of the CE-TCO activity this memo is built to target, the ransomware crews, romance investment fraud operations, and sextortion rings running out of Southeast Asia, does not victimize Americans in isolation. The scam compounds clustered along the Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos borders, repeatedly raided over the past two years, have held thousands of trafficked workers of dozens of nationalities, Indians consistently among the largest groups rescued, alongside Chinese, Filipino, and Malaysian nationals. India has run its own repatriation efforts out of Mae Sot in Thailand, bringing citizens home several hundred at a time, and has built its own institutional response to this threat through the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, which coordinates cybercrime enforcement across states and increasingly across borders.
That shared exposure gives India and the United States real common ground here. The criminal infrastructure this American Program is designed to disrupt is, in significant part, the same infrastructure that has trafficked and defrauded Indian citizens, which gives New Delhi genuine reason to watch this experiment closely and constructively. At the same time, the Program's underlying model, private companies conducting cross-border operations under one nation's legal authorization, is a genuinely new template in international cyber governance, and how it performs over its first year will likely shape how other major digital economies, India included, think about calibrating their own frameworks for public-private cooperation against transnational cybercrime. India and other nations should closely watch whether this becomes a template worth adapting or a cautionary tale worth avoiding.
It is pertinent to note that Justice and Homeland Security departments have 60 days to write detailed operating procedures covering everything from a target-vetting rubric to a classified operational workflow and 180 days to deliver the first status report to the White House.
References
- The White House. "Expanding Capabilities to Combat Transnational Cyber Enabled Crime." 12 August 2026. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expanding-capabilities-to-combat-transnational-cyber-enabled-crime/
- Wiley Rein LLP. "Navigating the New Presidential Memorandum on Transnational Cyber Enabled Crime." August 2026. https://www.wiley.law/alert-Navigating-the-New-Presidential-Memorandum-on-Transnational-Cyber-Enabled-Crime
- SecureWorld. "Trump Memo Lets Private Firms Hack Back at Cybercriminals." August 2026. https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/trump-authorizes-private-firms-offensive-cyber-operations
- CyberScoop. "A bold new strategy or a dangerous precedent? Experts are divided on Trump's memo." August 2026. https://cyberscoop.com/private-sector-hacking-presidential-memo-cybersecurity/
- CyberScoop. "Trump turns to private sector in offensive hacking operations memo." August 2026. https://cyberscoop.com/trump-memo-private-sector-offensive-hacking/
- CNN Politics. "Cyber privateers: Trump issues order allowing US companies to hack overseas groups under certain conditions." August 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/13/politics/cyber-privateers-trump-order-overseas-groups-hacking
- NPR. "Trump administration wants to allow companies to hack foreign cybercriminals." August 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/15/nx-s1-5930311/trump-companies-hack-foreign-cybercriminals
- The Next Web. "President Donald Trump signs memo letting US agencies hack transnational crime groups abroad." August 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/trump-cyber-memo-transnational-crime
- Machine News. "Security firms hit back at Trump's call to hack back against international crime gangs." August 2026. https://www.machine.news/security-firms-hit-back-at-trumps-call-to-hack-back-against-international-crime-gangs/
- Lawfare. "Trump Admin Cyber Strategy Centers Private Sector in Offensive Cyber Operations." March 2026. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/trump-admin-cyber-strategy-centers-private-sector-in-offensive-cyber-operations
- Lawfare. "Partners or Provocateurs? Private Sector Involvement in Offensive Cyber Operations." July 2025. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/partners-or-provocateurs--private-sector-involvement-in-offensive-cyber-operations
- Global Indian Network. "Pig Butchering Scams in India: The Dark Intersection of Social Media, AI, and Emotional Manipulation." January 2026. https://globalindiannetwork.com/pig-butchering-scams-in-india/
- The Tribune. "India brings home scammed 549 nationals from Myanmar in 2 days." 2025. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/india-brings-home-scammed-549-nationals-from-myanmar-in-2-days
- Malay Mail. "India to repatriate 500 nationals fleeing Myanmar's cyber scam hub, says Thai PM." October 2025. https://www.malaymail.com/amp/news/world/2025/10/29/india-to-repatriate-500-nationals-fleeing-myanmars-cyber-scam-hub-says-thai-pm/196399
- NBC News. "260 foreigners rescued from virtual slavery in Myanmar's online scam centers are being repatriated." 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/260-foreigners-rescued-virtual-slavery-myanmars-online-scam-centers-ar-rcna192180
- CyberPeace Foundation. "About Us." https://cyberpeace.org/about-us
Contributors
- Maj. Vineet Kumar, Founder & Global President, CyberPeace
- Mr. Neeraj Soni, Senior Research Analyst, Policy & Advocacy, CyberPeace
List of Abbreviations
- CE‑TCO — Cyber Enabled Transnational Criminal Organization
- DOJ — Department of Justice
- DHS — Department of Homeland Security
- FBI — Federal Bureau of Investigation
- CISA — Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
- I4C — Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre
- US — United States
- IT — Information Technology
