Update (30 September 2022):
Another video is being shared on social media with a similar claim about a man named Rajesh winning 70 Lakh rupees in a mobile casino.
We noticed that the video contains the same audio from the earlier post but with a different news reader’s video clip. The photo of a boy used in this video is an image taken by a photographer named Igor when he travelled to India (here). The rest of the video contains the same audio clip as the earlier video in this fact-check, the details of which can be seen below. With all this evidence, we can conclude that the claim made in the viral post is False.
Published (13 September 2022):
A video is being shared through a social media post about a Delhi man named Rajesh Meena. As per the video, Rajesh has won 70 lakh rupees in a mobile casino app and purchased a car and a house with that money. Let’s fact-check this video through this article.
Claim: Rajesh Meena, a Delhi man, has won prize money of 70 lakh rupees after gambling on a casino mobile app.
Fact: Firstly, there are no news reports about this incident. The photo of the person in the video belongs to an engineer named Hormazd Patel. The visuals of a man from Tamil Nadu purchasing his dream car are used in this video. Unrelated photos and videos have been used to create this story. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
We searched the internet for relevant news reports about the person Rajesh Meena winning 70 lakh rupees, but we did not find any. The video news report of the post contains a logo of India Today, and we did not find any article or a video report by India Today on Rajesh’s story. Upon reverse image search of the image of the so-called Rajesh Meena, we were led to an article published on poetsandquants.com titled ‘Overcoming The Male Indian Engineer Hurdle.‘ The same picture of the man from the viral post can be seen in this article, and the person’s name is mentioned Hormazd Patel, not Rajesh Meena. According to this article published in 2017, Hormazd Patel is an assistant manager at Bajaj.
We found his Linkedin profile, which confirms his identity, and his Facebook account has his pictures, with which we could conclude that he is the same person from the poets and quants article and whose picture is seen in the viral post.
The video also contains a clip of an old couple buying a Mercedes-Benz car. Through a keyword search on the internet, we found that the visuals are of a Tamil Nadu man buying a Benz car, which was his childhood dream. News reports on this story can be read here, here and here.
With all this evidence, we can conclude that the news report of Rajesh Meena winning huge prize money has been created using multiple different & unrelated visuals available on the internet.
To sum up, this news story of a Delhi man winning 70 lakh rupees in a mobile casino is pure work of fiction created with the magic of video editing.
