Fake international social media followers racket busted in Mumbai

The Crime Branch of Mumbai Police has unearthed an international racket involved in the creation of fake profiles on social media and fraudulent activities in the social media marketing business.

On July 11, a Bollywood playback singer had approached the Commissioner of Police Param Bir Singh in order to seek action as per law on unknown persons who had purportedly created her fake profile on Instagram.

The singer has also complained that the said unknown persons are approaching other film personalities to activate profiles through them.

Accordingly, the CP had directed the Crime Branch to investigate and as per the Joint CP (Crime) Vinoy Kumar Choubey’s order the Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) had taken up the matter.

In this regard, a complaint in Bangurnagar Police Station with CR number 439/2020 came to be registered.

With analytical technical intelligence and also through sources, one accused, Gauri Shankar Naga from Kurla has been arrested.

He was produced before the Metropolitan Magistrate and was remanded to police custody till July 17.

It has been revealed during the course of the investigation that the accused person is a part of a larger international fraud racket.

"The racket is functioning by creating crores of fake identities on various social media platforms and thereby creating fake performance statistics such as fake followers, fake comments, fake views, etc; in order to inflate influencers’ performance statistics," police officials said.

"The accused had so far created more than 5 lakhs, such fake followers, for a total of 176 profiles on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook social media platforms in order to fraudulently project them as influencers," police added.

The investigation carried so far has revealed that these fake followers are created either manually or by certain illegal software.

By manipulating the existing system of respective social networks, these racketeers post such fake followers etc.

There are estimated more than 100 such portals involved in such racket across India.

The arrested accused was working for one such portal.

It is for the first time that such a racket having international ramifications, been busted in India.

It has also found that these types of fake profiles and followers are being used to create rumours and panic amongst society.

The investigation conducted so far by the CIU of Mumbai’s Crime Branch, estimated more than 100 such Social Media Marketing (SMM) portals provide fake followers and others through fake identities and/or bots.

The perpetrators are found operating through Indian as well as foreign internet networks and servers.

54 such Indian portals have been duly identified by the Crime Branch and efforts are on to bring the culprits to justice.

The Crime Branch is also working in tandem with almost all the social media platforms in order to curb the menace of such fake influencers’ fraud racket.

Realising the scale of such illegal business growing exponentially, an SIT of CIU and Cyber Cell has been set up under the supervision of DCP ( Detection) Nandkumar Thakur to investigate and curb the malpractices. This will be the first-ever SIT of such kind that will investigate the illegal aspects of social media marketing businesses operating in violation of IT Act.