IN SHORT: A graphic circulating online in South Africa and Nigeria warns of criminals claiming to test blood sugar for free, only to infect people with HIV instead. But this hoax circulated in the Philippines in 2025, and the country’s health department debunked it.
According to a shocking claim sent to Africa Check by subscribers to our WhatsApp lines, criminals are going around offering free blood sugar tests but are injecting people with HIV instead.
“If someone comes to your door and says we’re in medical school, we want to test your blood sugar for free. do not accept the test. Call the police immediately,” reads the text on a circulating graphic.
“They are terrorists. they want to inject V. I. H. AIDS into your blood. Share this with your friends and family. Received and forwarded.”
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Human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, is a virus that attacks the body’s immune system. If left untreated, HIV can gradually wear down the immune system and progress to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (Aids), which is the most advanced stage of the disease.
The claim is circulating on WhatsApp in South Africa and has been posted on Facebook in Nigeria, including in groups with tens of thousands of followers.
It looks similar to another warning we previously debunked about criminals going door-to-door pretending to be officials from South Africa’s home affairs department.
So is this just another false online warning? We investigated.
Old hoax debunked in the Philippines in 2025
The first red flag is that this “warning” has not been reported by verified sources like the South African Police Service or the Nigeria Police Force.
Several clues made us question the graphic’s validity, including grammatical errors, such as HIV being spelt backwards as “V. I. H”.
The text also appears highlighted, like an optical character recognition (OCR) reading, where a feature or app like Google Lens can read the writing in an image and translate it into a chosen language.
Because of this, we suspected the graphic may have been created in another language, translated into English, and screenshotted for social media.
A quick search of the claim led us to a 2025 statement by the Department of Health in the Philippines, an archipelagic country in southeast Asia.
According to the statement, Philippine police had already debunked the message as false in the country, “confirming that it is a scare tactic with no factual basis”.
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There is no evidence that the year-old hoax, originating in the Philippines and most likely translated from Filipino – the country’s official language – has been occurring in South Africa and Nigeria.
Claims like these can be dangerous when widely shared; they cause unnecessary fear or panic among social media users.
Fact-checking zombie claims online
Here are a few points to consider when you come across zombie claims – those that just won’t die despite having been debunked before:
- Check the source: Many fake messages don’t say who wrote them, so how can you trust them? If you aren’t sure where its claims come from – be careful.
- Emotion-provoking claims: Many fake messages try to make you scared or angry. Be careful around messages that make scary or shocking claims and try to get you to warn others.
- Signs of a hoax: Learn the telltale signs, and if you are still not sure whether the message is a hoax, send it to us. We’ll try to debunk it for you.