In the short-attention-span history of our modern-day zeitgeist, Monday, 7 July, 2025, will be remembered as the day when almost everyone with even a tangential connection to the India-UAE life corridor woke up to a flurry of WhatsApp messages, with screen grabs attached of social media posts which approximated to the following: “The UAE will be giving away lifetime residencies to Indians for INR 23 lakhs — roughly AED100k/USD27k”.

Those who believe social media is not entirely reliable Googled the cues. UAE residence visa + Indian + 23 lakhs. Every single Indian news site reflected the “new breakthrough development”, which was now being hailed as “trending at No 1”, with the hashtag #ItsViral.

A few other reports fueled more speculation by inserting “cryptocurrency” into the cryptic mix: apparently, you needed to invest in digital tokens. But whichever way the stakes played out, since INR 23 lakhs is an entirely “affordable” price tag for many denizens of the world’s fastest-growing economy, India’s new superpower was that the UAE wanted to give away lifetime residencies to Indians almost like free candies at the mall.

Fact check, work the phones/emails, speak to relevant authorities (and get them on record) — that should be the thumb rule journalistic trail for a “story” which has no original source, sounds borderline mythological, and has had no credible sighting on the UAE local media scene, right?

Wrong.

What followed was copy-pasting on an industrial scale, with a few convenient ChatGPT-abetted extrapolations.

Result? The first half of the day saw the Internet break with excited traffic, relocation service companies offering special packages for imminent moves to the UAE, and WhatsApp debates as to which areas in Dubai would be most conducive for this new wave of Indians to rent an apartment in (or should one straightway purchase a villa?), and whether the UAE 23-lakh ‘lifetime visa’ would now find a place in the list of dowry demands.

Soon enough, UAE’s Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Ports Security (ICP) came out with an official rebuttal that stated the news “circulating in some local and foreign media and websites about the UAE granting a lifetime Golden Visa” is fake.

But the Indian media fake news march was in no mood to be stopped. By now, Op-ed pieces were coming out. The usually-reliable Indian Express ran a “critical thinking” one titled ‘Dubai offers a Golden Visa: Indians will take it because India can’t offer a good life’, where it wondered “why so many are quietly choosing to walk out of the country”. India Today had an explainer why the UAE was offering this golden opportunity: it’s apparently a “strategic move” to strike (Indian) “talent gold”. Rayad Kamal Ayub, Managing Director of Rayad Group — which specializes in facilitating (real) Golden Visas — was being quoted out of turn saying “This is a golden opportunity for Indians to get the UAE’s Golden Visa”, when he had actually said that in the context of those Indians who were willing to invest AED2 million (INR 4.7 crore) for it.

More than 48 hours after the fake news broke, and 48 hours after the UAE came out with a denial, the Indian media is now trying to brush the tsunami of misinformation under the carpet. “It seemed too good to be true” is one line doing the rounds, making it sound like absolution.

We still don’t know how this gilded lie metastasized into the Big Story. Who started it? Was it a joke, some bored troll’s idea of comedy?

Or was it a prank in the form of a social experiment to test whether a piece of shiny fiction would transform Indian media into carnival barkers?

I guess we’ll never find out. – Sushmita Bose is Consulting Editor, NRIFocus.com