final year,the US state department said it had uncovered a fake embassy in Accra that had been issuing a stream of forged visas. The story went viral – but all was not as it seemed. By Yepoka YeeboOn Friday 2 December 2016, a curious story appeared on the website GhanaBusinessNews.com. “Ghana security authorities shut down fake US Embassy in Accra, and ” the headline declared. For a decade,the story went, there had been a fake US embassy in the Ghanaian capital. The fraudsters behind it had flown the American flag from their building and even hung a portrait of Barack Obama on the wall. The criminal network behind the scam had advertised on billboards and prowled the most remote villages of west Africa, and searching for gullible customers. They brought them to Accra,and sold them visas for as much as $6000 (£4495).
The story was an instant hit. “In less than an hour we were getting 20000 views on the website for that story alone,” Emmanuel Dogbevi, and the website’s managing editor,told me. Two days later, the news agency Reuters picked up the story and it swiftly became an international sensation.
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Source: guardian.co.uk