By Shambhavi Singh: Cybercriminals and hackers are conning common people by creating fake profiles of senior police officers including IPS officers on Facebook. Recent trend shows after making these fake profiles, they make friends with as many people as possible and then start demanding money citing different personal and social reasons.
A recent example of such crime is of a 17-year-old boy from Rajasthan who instead of using his latest smartphone gifted by his parents for online classes used it to create fake Facebook page of top police officers from Kerala. He demanded money from those in his friend list but went out of luck when cyber police of Kerala got a complaint against him and tracked him back in Rajasthan.
A senior police officer told The420 that the boy had copied images and details for senior IPS officers from various sources to create fake social media account. The boy used the mobile phone his parents bought him for attending online classes to cheat people.
The teenager after making the fake account added several people as friends. People in return also got connected after seeing the profile of senior IPS officer. But, later he started demanding money by saying that he is collecting money for charity.
Many innocent people fell into his trap, but one of the friends sensed foul play and directly contacted the officer. As soon the incident came to light, Kerala cyber police contacted Facebook officials who blocked the account.
Investigators traced the accused IP address and located him in Rajasthan. Cops have found more fake social media accounts cops being in use. Efforts are on to trace the individuals handling those accounts.
These scam activities have recently seen a huge spike where fake accounts on different social media platforms are made following which friends are requested to deposit money citing humanitarian work of personal distress.