On July 6, following the controversy revolving around Alt News and Razorpay, it was found that the old Instamojo donation page of Alt News was still active. First reported by the Twitter user The Hawk Eye, the donation page on Instamojo is not active, but it also accepts donations. The Hawk Eye tested and successfully made a donation and published the screenshot with the tweet.
ALERT: Alt News Instamojo page which is supposedly “discontinued”, is found active. Not just the page is live, but it is possible to make donations also from overseas thru Indian a/c. This snapshot shows a payment made on 6/Jul/22 on https://t.co/tdRkVq5UYF
— The Hawk Eye (@thehawkeyex) July 6, 2022
15/ pic.twitter.com/UXiEDOqtPw
In his tweet, The Hawk Eye wrote, “Alt News Instamojo page which is supposedly “discontinued”, is found active. Not just the page is live, but it is possible to make donations also from overseas thru Indian a/c. This snapshot shows a payment made on 6/Jul/22 on https://instamojo.com/@altnews/.”
It is notable that Alt News shifted to Razorpay only four months ago, in February 2022. Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of Alt News who is currently in judicial custody, had shared the information on his Twitter profile.
OpIndia had earlier reported that Alt News used to accept donation via Instamojo, which uses gateways such as UPI, PayTM, VISA for accepting money.
Instamojo accepts international payment as per their website on case to case basis. It is not yet clear whether Alt News has accepted foreign funding through its Instamojo page.
Alt News tries to spin statement of Razorpay as ‘clean chit’ for themselves
Earlier, OpIndia reported that Alt News tried to give it a clean chit to itself and threw payment gateway Razorpay under the bus. Alt News, in its statement, insinuated that Razorpay acted arbitrarily and disabled their ‘donation platform’ on receiving request from police authorities. Alt News claimed that Razorpay informed them that their account was reactivated by Razorpay after they got some clarity but they did not specify what the said clarity was.
Alt News then gave itself clean chit by claiming that if Razorpay had found Alt News violated terms of service, they would not have reenabled their account. Thereby insinuating that Razorpay reactivating their account was an evidence of their not being in violation of any rule of the platform. Alt News also tried to dog-whistle against it by claiming that Razorpay handed over their data to the police. And that this was done without informing them or without any ‘prior investigation’ of any violation on part of Alt News.
