The business of fake social media accounts, revealed in Mumbai arrest

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2020-07-18 14:14:27

The Mumbai Police earlier this week arrested a 20-year-old man for allegedly creating a fake profile of Bollywood playback singer Bhoomi Trivedi. The interrogation of the accused Abhishek Daude revealed that there are several such companies that sell followers and ‘likes’ on social media.

Mumbai Police have now decided to widen the scope of the investigation, and will probe what they are calling the “social media marketing influencers fraud”.

Purported chat logs of a fake Instagram account created under the name of Bhoomi Trivedi that purported to show her in apparent negotiations for purchasing fake followers were allegedly used by Daude to lure more people to purchase followers.

When Trivedi found out about the alleged racket being run in her name, she approached the Mumbai Police Commissioner, and an offence was registered. The police then arrested Kurla resident Daude.

According to police, it has revealed during investigation that Daude is part of a racket to create crores of fake identities on various social media platforms, and thereby produce fake performance statistics such as followers, comments, and views — all fake. The idea was to allegedly to inflate the performance statistics of ‘influencers’.