IT Correspondent
Mumbai, Aug. 9:
Former model and “Miss India Top 21 finalist 2016” and recent UPSC all India rank winner Aishwarya Sheoran (23) has lodged a complaint of fake instagram accounts in her name, at Colaba Police station in South Mumbai.
The Police have registered an offence under section 66 of the Information Technology Act against unknown persons and further investigation is on, Senior Police Inspector Shivaji Phadtare said.
Soon after the news broke of Aishwarya Sheoran (a daughter of an army colonel), having cracked the UPSC exams in her first attempt achieving an All India Rank of 93, multiple accounts on Instagram impersonating her have cropped up. In fact she does not have a single instagram account.
As of now, there are at least 20 accounts on Instagram masquerading as ‘Aishwarya Sheoran’. One of the accounts, with the handle name ‘aishwaryasheoran’, had a publicly available photo of Sheoran as the profile picture. While the account was set to private, it had three posts and 44 followers.
Another account, called ‘aishwarya.sheoran’ had a bio which read “Aishwarya Sheoran, Femina Miss India Finalist’2016, UPSC ALL INDIA RANK 93″. While the profile picture of this account too was publicly available, there were two posts made by the account. One account which claimed as “ an official account” had 27,000 followers.
She came known about the fake instagram accounts in her name on 05 August 2020, during an interview to a newspaper. Interviewing Reporter asked her about her instagram accounts, to which she replied that had none. Then reporter provided her information about the accounts operating in her name. After checking instagram she was in rude shock when she came across a number of fake accounts, which claimed as her official accounts. She then promptly approached the police.
Aishwarya resides with her mother and siblings at Army Officers’ Colony at Colaba, while her father Colonel Ajay Kumar Sharon is posted at Karim Nagar in Telengana.
Incidentally the Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU) recently set up by the Mumbai Police to detect cyber related crimes has been constantly receiving the complaints of fake accounts on social media.
Till now the police have arrested two persons in connection with fake social media followers. According to police a larger global fraud racket is 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. Such fake statistics is 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 Mumbai Police officials have also found that a few Bollywood stars, sports persons and high profile people have allegedly paid to get fake followers on social media.
