20 August 2026InternLeaks

What Indian Reddit says about fake internships

On Indian student Reddit, the rule is blunt. If they ask you to pay, walk. If they go quiet when you ask about stipend, walk. Search the company name on your college sub before you join a WhatsApp group.

On r/developersIndia, r/Btechtards, and campus subs such as r/delhiuniversity, the filter for fake internships is already written in the comments. Do not pay. Do not treat a Google Form as an interview. Search the company name on Reddit before you join the WhatsApp group.

Web developer, full stack, Flutter, and digital marketing are the titles that clog those threads. Reddit is not a court. It is still faster than finding out after the UPI has gone.

Quick answer

What these subs treat as a hard no:

Any fee: ₹1, ₹300, "activation," certificate, platform charge, refundable deposit.
A take-home that looks like a real product, with a two-day deadline, before anyone will talk stipend.
A marketing or "business development" internship whose work is forwarding posters, selling a course, or posting on your own Instagram.

Paste the company name into Reddit search, then into your college or city sub. If seniors already fought about it, read that fight first.

The developersIndia thread that spilled onto the news

In May 2025, a post on r/developersIndia, titled roughly "Free Work Culture In India | Why is it so Difficult To Pay For Work", got picked up by NDTV and The Economic Times. The original poster, u/socialblazes, described a remote Flutter internship listed at ₹8,000 to ₹10,000 a month. They finished a technical task on a two-day deadline. There was a call about the "work environment." Then they asked what stipend they could actually expect. After that, silence.

News9 quoted the same person: the stipend was already in the ad, they were not asking for a fortune, and the company still vanished.

Comments from that thread, as those outlets reported them, are the advice a lot of juniors never get in class.

One user called unpaid "trial" periods a literal scam. You apply, you agree to two unpaid weeks "so we can assess you," then the company rotates the next batch. The hire never comes.

Another said they were on ₹5,000 a month because the manager knew they needed a six-month internship for a college degree.

ET highlighted a highly voted line: do not work for free. Turn the assignment into a portfolio piece and put it on LinkedIn instead of handing the company a finished app.

That last point is the one that catches web and full stack listings. The ugly ones are not always a ₹199 certificate mill. Plenty look like startups. The tell is the work happening before any written stipend, mentor name, or repo access.

The other Reddit genre: "is this internship scam or legit"

Engineering campus subs run a shorter thread. Someone dumps a screenshot. No LinkedIn. Google Form. "Activation payment" of a few hundred rupees. Then they wait for the sub to roast it.

A January 2026 snapshot of this r/Btechtards post is one of those. The poster asked about an "alkame inc" internship. They could not find past openings on Unstop or a company LinkedIn. There was a ₹300 ask in a personal name. Highest-voted replies said if it asks for money it is a scam, never pay, even ₹1 is a red flag, and "activation payment" is a joke. Someone compared it to "I'll give you a 12 LPA job, just pay 50k advance." Another lumped "unified mentor and those education ones" with any programme that takes money, and said most internships on "this platform" felt like scams.

Those comments are student opinion, not a court finding on any named firm. The rule they keep repeating is the useful part. The payment is the story. The brand on the PDF is almost a distraction.

Other Btechtards threads from early 2026, also in public snapshots, show the mood around Internshala. A second-year CSE student asked how to intern at all. Someone replied they had never found anyone who got an internship from Internshala. In a later "cracked 3 internship offers" post, a commenter said the offers they did get were scam or unpaid, and asked where the real ones actually came from.

That is not proof the site is fake. Internshala's own guide says listings can still slip through, and that no trusted employer asks you to pay for training, registration, or a deposit. The scepticism on the sub is about what happens after Apply: ghosting, bait stipends, sales work wearing a marketing title.

How tech internships look in these threads

Web, full stack, Flutter, and "AI intern" posts attract two messes. People mix them up, which is how a calculator-app "internship" ends up next to a real startup stint on the same resume.

Certificate mill, the version juniors paste most often:

Offer letter after a form. No live coding.
Task is a to-do app, Netflix UI clone, or JavaScript calculator. YouTube already did it.
Post the offer on LinkedIn and tag the page, or no certificate.
At the end, a small UPI for the PDF.

Take-home as product, the version that made developersIndia angry:

Listing mentions a stipend.
Assignment is days of real engineering, sometimes deploy-it-live level.
Stipend talk is delayed, then the chat dies.
Or the posting says that by applying you agree to unpaid weeks "for assessment."

If you are applying for web or full stack work, ask in writing before you build: who reviews the PR, what repo you get, and when stipend hits the account. A full blog with MongoDB and an admin panel as "round 1" is not a screening test. That is unpaid product work. Students have described the same thing on LinkedIn after Internshala applications. On Reddit it is usually shorter: assignment tha, stipend pucha, ghost.

How marketing internships look, including the DU WhatsApp circuit

Delhi University students use the same Internshala and LinkedIn firehose as everyone else. The junk in class groups is not a campus-office internship with a published process. It is a Google Form and a Meet link.

Public posts from DU-tagged students and class forwards tend to follow one script. Instant select. A welcome Meet packed with people who were all "carefully chosen." Stipend is "performance based," meaning sell to friends. Unpaid reels for the company's own page. Then sell a training programme and keep a cut if someone buys. The title says marketing or business development. The work is a sales quota.

If the brief is "share this in 20 personal chats before onboarding," you are the campaign. A certificate for forwarding WhatsApp messages does as little for a DU commerce or journalism resume as a mill-issued web-dev PDF does for CSE. On the marketing side the tell is simple. There is no client. There is your contact list.

When in doubt, post the JD on r/delhiuniversity, r/Indian_Academia, or your college Discord, with the company name visible. Ask whether anyone actually interned there, and whether they got paid. Lurk for a day. Useful answers are boring: I did X, stipend came on date Y, manager was Z. Hype answers (guaranteed certificate, remote, no interview) are the ad.

A Reddit-shaped check before you say yes

Open search. Refuse to be rushed.

Google the exact company name with site:reddit.com. Then search it inside r/developersIndia, r/Btechtards, r/delhiuniversity, r/Indian_Academia, or whichever sub matches your course.
Read comments, not the title. "Is this legit" posts are often written by someone who already wants it to be legit.
If the only "employees" on LinkedIn are interns from this year, treat the page as a landing page.
Ask about money in the first real conversation, the way the Flutter poster did. Ghosting is data.
Keep assignments under a few hours unless you are already hired on paper. Past that, you are shipping their backlog.
For marketing roles, ask who the client is and where the analytics live. If the client is your friends on WhatsApp, stop.
Report the listing on Internshala, LinkedIn, or Unstop if they asked for UPI. Warn your class group with screenshots. Do not dump other people's numbers.

If you want a searchable pile of student-submitted names, internleaks.com keeps one. Those are reports, not verdicts. The subs are still the better place to hear how people in your year talk about a company.

What to do if you already joined the group

Mute it. Stop paying. Do not install "training" remote-access apps.

Save the offer PDF, the UPI screenshot, and the chat. If they owe you a certificate you already paid for, that is a consumer mess. Do not send more money to "unlock" it.

Post a dry recap on the sub where you would have asked first: company name, what they promised, what they asked you to pay or build, what happened. That recap helps the next second-year more than a motivational LinkedIn dump.

College-mandatory internships are the ugly special case in those threads. People take ₹5,000 or unpaid seats because the degree form needs a stamp. If that is you, still refuse fees, and still refuse two-week unpaid "trials" that look like product work. If the college is the one pushing the company, get the TPO to confirm it in writing.

Frequently asked questions

What does Indian Reddit say about fake internships?

Pay nothing to join. Treat a bait stipend that vanishes when you ask as a warning. Search r/developersIndia and your campus sub for the company name. Certificate-only remote "web internships" and sales-disguised marketing internships are the two plots that come up constantly.

Is every unpaid internship a scam according to r/developersIndia?

No. The anger in the 2025 Flutter thread was about advertised pay that disappeared, and about unpaid trials used as a labour pipeline. Commenters still separate a small known startup that is honest about having no stipend from a listing that lies.

How do I check a fake web developer or full stack internship on Reddit?

Search the company plus "internship" on r/developersIndia and r/Btechtards. Public tutorial clone, LinkedIn posting, certificate fee: mill pattern. Multi-day app and they will not talk stipend: free-labour pattern.

Are Internshala internships fake?

Not as a category. Students on r/Btechtards often say they personally never saw a good one. That is who posts on that sub, not a census of every listing. Internshala says it reviews posts and that you should report anyone who asks for money. You still have to read the JD like a sceptic.

Where should DU students ask if a marketing internship is real?

r/delhiuniversity, seniors' WhatsApp (same scepticism), and a public Reddit search of the company. If the work is selling a course or blasting personal contacts, it is not a marketing internship.

Final takeaway

The Indian student subs already settled this. Money out of your UPI is disqualifying. Silence after you ask about stipend is disqualifying. A marketing role that is only referrals is disqualifying. Search the name on Reddit, ask the money question early, and keep the assignment short enough that you could throw it on GitHub if they vanish.