Talk about a social media shit storm.

Yesterday afternoon, an image showing an “email” allegedly sent to a MiWay Insurance employee by a colleague did the rounds on social media.

Picked up by the Twitterati, within two hours of its release it had caused some serious public relations damage.

Here’s the email:

At a glance, what the email states is awful: “reject 90% of claims made by black people”, “they are an easy target”, and “punish these black baboons” are all utterly reprehensible.

MiWay Insurance has since distanced itself from the email, with chief executive officer Rene Otto calling it ‘fake news’ and a ‘hoax’, reports EWN:

Otto says they will prove that the email is fake.

“Its absolute nonsense, fake news on steroids. There has never been such a decision and it’s a hoax email. I have just seen the mail myself. We are busy following the threads so we will be able to prove that it’s false and falsified.”

MiWay says as far as it’s established, a disgruntled client was responsible for that email screenshot.

Otto says a client whose claim was rejected fabricated the email.

“As far as we could establish in the hour or so that we’ve been able to look into it, it was a disgruntled client who was unhappy because we couldn’t pay his claim. He had email contact with us because in the process of validating the claim, we did send the emails. That’s how he got a name of a MiWay staff member, and clearly, he thought the way to punish us was the way he did.”

“Fake news on steroids”, that’s a new one. I wonder how long it will take Trump to adopt it.

While MiWay investigates the matter, South Africans have done their own investigations:

Of course, it’s going to take a lot more than that to convince other members of Twitter otherwise:

Good luck out there, MiWay.

[source:ewn]