This comes after Muhammad Azhar Ali, a self-proclaimed astrophile, received congratulatory messages from Malaysians in response to his April 30 tweet, which included screenshots of a suggestion letter allegedly sent by a NASA official.
Other screenshots attached to the tweet showed Azhar allegedly making it into the highest 1 percent of the greater than 3.6 million participants within the US space agency’s Artemis challenge. Another screenshot showed Azhar allegedly being listed on NASA’s website as a “citizen scientist.”
In the next days, Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin shared Azhar’s tweet with a congratulatory message.
He was also congratulated by Malaysian Minister of Higher Education Noraini Ahmad and Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation Khairy Jamaluddin.
Azhar, who says he’s 20 years old on his Twitter profile, even appeared on television to advertise Malaysia.
However, unlike ministers and the media, members of the net community saw holes in Azhar’s story and plenty of of them decided to fact-check his claims.
Among the various inconsistencies was the shortcoming to seek out Azhar’s name on NASA’s online list of citizen scientists, as a screenshot suggested.
On May 3, NUS informed Says.com that it had not sent any offer letter to the scholar. The university also clarified that it doesn’t offer a “Mathematics/Applied Mathematics for Cosmology” course and doesn’t have such a scholarship with NASA.
Shortly after the doubts were raised, Azhar’s Twitter account was taken offline. However, he later posted a series of tweets saying he had likely been conned.
According to the scholar, he entered the NASA competition in March and received an email letting him know he was in the highest 1 percent.
“Two things happened with this, many congratulated me and just a few checked the authenticity of the certificate. Thank you, you’re my heroes. The foremost email comprises only an attachment and a link,” he wrote.
“What we, myself included, can learn from that is that we should always all the time confirm authenticity before engaging or presenting any form of reports to the general public. I won’t apologize for being a victim of fraud [sic].”
He also said he felt “very sad for the many people I don’t even know who, like me, fall for this type of scam, potentially losing their money and dignity.”
Describing himself as a student “reaching the height of my profession”, Azhar added that he has received offers from “r“renowned institutions from abroad”and asked the general public to ““put my future profession in danger for this reason uncertainty.”
Azhar said he had previously raised the difficulty with NASA.
Business Insider reported that it had contacted the NASA press office for comment.
This article was originally published on Business information.
