Fact Check: Advert with Mukesh Ambani endorsing a stock trading mentorship program is deepfake

Hyderabad: A video of chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani promoting a stock trading mentorship program.

The caption along with the video promises a ‘free mentorship programme’ that will help show ‘200% growth in Just Three Days!’ in stock trading.

In the viral video, Mukesh Ambani could be seen saying, “If you have 500 rupees, how to increase it to 100 rupees or from 50,000 rupees to 5 million rupees? Follow me and my student Mr Veenit to get specific investment advice and also get stock buying and selling information, completely free of charge.” An image cutout of a man in a suit is superimposed on the video which could the ‘Mr Veenit’ mentioned in the video.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is false as the viral video is a digitally manipulated deepfake.

On closely analyzing the viral video, we found certain discrepancies such as a discernible lack of video quality around the mouth, and the movement of lips and the audio being out of sync. Also, it is quite unlikely to believe that Mukesh Ambani, being the richest business tycoon in India, would endorse a shady stock market trading mentorship program.

We started our investigation by performing a reverse image search using the keyframes from the viral video and found a still from a video uploaded on an ANI media report, titled ‘World 21st century as India’s, we can be USD 40 trillion economy by 2047: Mukesh Ambani’ published on December 29, 2022.

Further search led us to a media report by Business Today dated December 30, 2022, carrying the original video of Mukesh Ambani’s speech on the 90th birth anniversary of Reliance India Limited.

According to the report, in a virtual address, Mukesh Ambani said, “The world is seeing the 21st century as ‘India’s century’, and the country can become a ‘$40 trillion economy by 2047’,” on December 28, 2022. We could not find Ambani mentioning any stock market trading mentorship program throughout the video.

A close analysis can be done in the comparison picture below.

Moving forward, we did a reverse image search using the image of the purported ‘mentor Mr Veenit’ in the viral video. Through our search, we found a media report by Moneycontrol carrying the image of Nitin Bhasin, the head of research-institutional equities, Ambit Capital which looked similar to the viral image. Although the tie the person wearing in both images is the same, the person in the Moneycontrol report did not have a beard.

On carefully analysing both images, we found that the viral image of ‘Mr Veenit’ was digitally created by manipulating the original image.

The same image can be seen on Outlook Business’ official Facebook page as well.

Hence, it is evident that the viral video of Mukesh Ambani endorsing a stock trading mentorship program is not just a deepfake but also that the program and the mentor do not exist.