Few days ago, we received an e-mail from a school called 'Hull University, Malta' requesting us to publish a scholarship they were running in conjunction with the European Union. We obliged them, and on Saturday, April 19th, 2014, we published the EU Africa Scholarships at Hull University for Undergraduate and Postgraduate Africans whose application deadline is slated for 14 June, 2014.
Since then, we have seen similar scholarship publications all over the internet whose publishers may have either copied from us, or perhaps were also contacted by the school to publish the same article.
We have also received several complaints from many of our readers who have tried to apply to the school. Complaints have ranged from the minute issues to the very obvious facts, so we decided to investigate the school and its scholarship offer ourselves.
Our findings
Our findings have been listed below.1). Suspicious Links on the Official Website
On visiting the official website at www.hulluniversitymalta.com, Study & Scholarships was dismayed to find that all social media icons located on the footer of the site were all broken. None, not even one, was active and working.This is a 'never-never' for a school deemed with such repute.
Schools of the magnitude of the so-called Hull University in Malta would normally have thousands of their students signed up on the university's Facebook page, Twitter handle, YouTube channel and LinkedIn company page.
However, all of the links to these were broken, and going further, all these social media sites confirmed they had no such university registered with them.
2). Suspicious Internet Presence
Doing a simple forensic search with the Internet Time Machine, and the popular search engines - Google, Bing, etc; revealed that the official website had just been recently created.A further search on Wikipedia gave evidence that someone had recently tried to and successfully created a 'Hull University, Malta' page on the popular reference Wiki website; but the said page was promptly and summarily deleted. The explanation by Wikipedia gives evidence for this:
This page has been deleted. The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.You can see this on this Wikipedia page.
22:45, 12 April 2014 RHaworth (talk | contribs) deleted page HULL UNIVERSITY, MALTA (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion)
In addition, the only university with a name close to 'Hull University' that we could trace and confirm was in the United Kingdom; and located at http://www.hull.ac.uk/. Its Wikipedia page is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Hull.
3). Interaction with authorities
Finally, an email to the European Union returned a reply confirming that the EU was not collaborating in any way whatsoever, nor connected, to any scholarship offer with any Hull university in Malta.Our Conclusions
Following our investigations, and the outcome of our investigations as listed above, we have come to the conclusion that there is no such school as 'Hull University, Malta'. And also that the scholarship being offered by the said school is nothing but a charade and a fraud.Study & Scholarships cannot confirm what the people behind this hopes to achieve; however, we are profusely sorry to have published that scholarship article in the first place.
We take all the blame, and STRONGLY advice that you desist forthwith from any associations whatsoever with the entity called 'Hull University, Malta'.
We will soon be taking down the published offending scholarship article located at http://www.studyandscholarships.com/2014/04/european-union-africa-scholarship-programme.html.
We are truly sorry for this error and apologize.
We go ahead to thank all our readers who have written in to bring this to our notice. Thank you as we together continue to search for and bring honest and genuine scholarships to you.
Related: Scholarships in the UK for International Students
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