IT News
Mumbai: Aug. 7:
A popular rapper “Badshah” was interrogated by officers of Mumbai Police in connection with fake social media followers case on Thursday. He will be questioned again for which the Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU) has prepared a list of 238 questions.
Aditya Prateek Singh Sisodia, alias “Badshah” is being investigated, since his official Instagram account @badboyshah has witnessed a huge increase in the number of followers. He has many hits to his credit including ‘Taarefan’ and ‘DJ Wale Babu’. His video ‘Genda Phool’ has been a remarkable hit.
In their investigation so far, Mumbai Police officials have found that a few Bollywood stars, sports persons and high profile people have allegedly paid to get fake followers on social media.
Last month, CIU busted a racket, where fake followers and views were being bought by several celebs, in violation of the Information Technology Act (IT Act). The matter came to light after singer Bhoomi Trivedi registered a complaint with the police on 11 July, about a fake Instagram account, she found on social media. The investigation led police to a business based on identity theft.
One Abhishek Donde (21) was arrested for hacking the instagram account of Trivedi. The accused had prepared 176 fake profiles and had created over half-a-million fake followers. He was also approaching other film personalities to create such profiles for them.
The police also arrested one Kashif Mandoor (30), a civil engineer by profession who was running a racket of hacking profiles of prominent personalities on www.amvsmm.com
. He had collected 2.03 crore followers through 25,000 orders of “likes” and “comments” on social media.
Investigations revealed that a larger global fraud racket involved in creating crores of fake identities on various social media platforms and making fake performance statistics like fake followers, fake comments, fake views etc, to inflate the influencers’ performance statistics is in operation. Such fake statistics was used to promote social media marketing business. Besides, such fake profiles and followers are also being used to create rumours and panic in the society.
The CIU officers, busted the international racket after gathering information with analytical techint (technological-intelligence) and through own sources. The CIU has also found that over 100 such Social Media Marketing (SMM) portals are providing fake followers, through fake identities and the scamsters are operating through Indian and international Internet networks and servers. The CIU has already identified 54 such Indian portals and action is being initiated against them.
The CIU is first ever SIT set up in the country to investigate the illegal aspects of social media marketing businesses operating in violation of the IT Act.
