BY: Abdulrasheed Akere
Claim:
UNICEF has Commence Reruitment for 10,000 adhoc staff to fill vacant positions.
Verdict:
The claim that UNICEF has commenced recruitment of 10,000 adhoc staff to fill vacant positions is false. The link attached to the claim is malicious.
FAKE
Full text:
A forwarded message has been circulating online that United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has commenced recruitment of 10,000 adhoc staff to fill vacant positions. The message has its heading bolded and in block form, “UNICEF STAFF RECRUITMENT ePORTAL” while some other parts of the message are bolded. Another bolded part reads, “To apply, please use our official recruitment portal below:
The message included that, “Shortlisted candidates will be notified by email. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.” In the post which has been shared many times on WhatsApp and other platforms, there’s noticeable grammatical and spelling errors in it. The post says “has Commence” instead of has commenced, it also spelt recruitment wrongly as “reruitment.”
UNICEF is a non-governmental organization established in 1946 to aid post-war children, it became a permanent UN agency in 1953. It works in over 190 countries to protect children’s rights, health, and education. The organization’s focus is to help the most vulnerable children, regardless of where they live.
Verification:
To verify the claim, FactCheckAfrica checked UNICEF’s official handles on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram but found no related information to back the recruitment claim. Also, during several checks on websites and Google keyword search, no trusted media outlet published a recent report in favor of the claim.
The claim was sent to Grok AI and asked how true it is, it replied with: “The news is completely false—it’s a well-known phishing scam. The message you shared (claiming UNICEF is recruiting 10,000 adhoc staff via the link https://unicef-career.workvisa.live/staff) is not legitimate. It circulates widely on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, especially in places like Nigeria, but it is designed to trick people into visiting a fake site and handing over personal information (or worse).”
When clicked on the application link provided on the post, it displayed, “SMS: Welcome To UNICEF Recruitment Portal 2026, Kindly Press OK to PROCEED JOBS Cancel OK.” An effort to click on cancel in order to proceed with the application proved abortive as the site was adamant on its request to click on OK.
phishing site view
Further research revealed that the link provided: unicef-career.workvisa.live is not an official UNICEF domain. When the link was submitted to DNSDumpster, a domain reconnaissance tool that discovers subdomains, DNS records, and mapping infrastructure, it declared it an ‘Invalid Domain’. Another verification tool, VirusTotal flagged the URL as malicious. According to WhoIs, the domain — workvisa.live was registered on 2025-10-09 and will expire on 2026-10-09, it was updated on 2025-10-14.
A similar verification on UNICEF’s official link revealed that its domain — unicef.org was registered 1993-03-10 and will expire on 2030-03-11, it was updated on 2021-02-11.
However, as found on UNICEF’s official website, the organization is currently recruiting for some positions but not 10,000 adhoc staff.
Conclusion:
Based on the findings, the claim that UNICEF has commenced recruitment of 10,000 adhoc staff to fill vacant positions is false. The link attached to the claim is malicious, the domain lifespan is just a year which indicates that it was created for phishing purposes.
