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Impersonating a public office costs nothing and occasionally pays very well. A photograph, a name, a plausible sentence and a payment address are enough to convince a reasonable person, and the more senior the office the more convincing the fake becomes. This post is a practical guide to checking, written because the alternative is asking people to rely on instinct.

Start with the account rather than the message. The Prime Minister publishes on X as @MatekaneSam, and that account carries government verification, which is a different and stronger signal than a purchased badge. A screenshot of a post proves nothing at all: it is a picture, and pictures are trivially made. If a post matters, find it on the account rather than accepting an image of it.

Be more suspicious of a message that reaches you than one you went looking for. Nearly every impersonation arrives: forwarded in a group, replied into a thread, sent as a direct message. Material published by this office sits at a fixed address and waits. If something urgent arrives from an account you did not seek out, that urgency is itself the technique.

Money is where impersonation concentrates, because it is where impersonation pays. This office will never contact you privately to request funds. It will never send an address by direct message, reply, comment, or on any platform. The addresses for receiving contributions are published on this website and nowhere else, and any address for this office obtained anywhere else should be treated as fraudulent, including one that appears in a reply beneath a genuine post.

Two details make this worth taking seriously. Transfers in digital currency cannot be reversed: once sent, funds are gone, and no bank, platform or office can retrieve them. And an address is a long string of characters that nobody reads carefully, which is why the published ones on this site are shown in full alongside their first and last characters and their length, so that they can be compared quickly rather than squinted at.

There are things this office will not ask you for at all. It will not ask for a password, a one-time code, a copy of an identity document, or bank details, by any channel. It will not ask you to move a conversation to another application. It will not ask you to keep a communication confidential from other officials.

For any published item, the check is short. Every news item on this site carries a link to the original post it came from. Follow it. You will land on the account itself, where the post has its own date and its own history. If the site and the original ever disagree, the original is right.

For anything not on this site, the safest assumption is that it did not come from here. This office publishes to a website and to one verified account. It does not brief through anonymous channels, and a genuine communication has no reason to reach you by a route that cannot be checked.

If you encounter something claiming to be from this office that you cannot verify, the useful response is not to argue with it but to report it to the platform and to say plainly, wherever you saw it, that you could not verify it. Impersonations survive on being passed along by people who assumed somebody else had checked.