Bhopal: Hacking, cloning of FB accounts on rise, even cops not spared

BHOPAL: The light and easy passwords on the social media platform Facebook are the soft target of the cyber criminals. These FB users are on the target of the cyber criminals operating from Mewat (Haryana), Bharatpur (Rajasthan) or parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal.

Incidents of hacking of FB accounts or creation of identical FB accounts/cloning of FB accounts by cyber fraudsters have grown alarmingly during the Covid-19 lockdown or during subsequent unlock phases which have seen a surge in the novel Coronavirus pandemic.  Even the IPS officer was not spared and his fake profile are prepared which was used to seek monetary help.  

Facebook users who have made entries from their ‘About Info’ or their ‘phone numbers’ as the password of their FB login ID are the first target of the criminals.

MP Police's cyber cell sources in Bhopal too confirmed the trend. "Out of the ten cases of cybercrime being reported to us daily in Bhopal, three to four cases pertain to FB account hacking or FB account cloning," said a senior cyber cell officer in Bhopal.

According to investigators, as FB users are spending more time on FB while staying indoors due to Covid-19 threat outside, the cyber fraudsters are tailing the behaviour of FB users. Observing that many FB users are seeking monetary help from friends over the social media platform due to loss of job or medical urgency, the cyber fraudsters too are using the cloned FB accounts or hacked FB accounts to make identical requests citing similar reasons and managing to dupe some of the FB users.

In the case pertaining to the cloning of the FB account of the police chief of one of the districts neighbouring Indore, the fraudsters operating the IPS officer's cloned page managed to get Rs 10,000 from the cop's friend based in Dhar district of MP.

The MP police's cyber cops are waiting for the corona threat to decline before joining cyber cops of the concerned states in making a swoop on the dens of the cyber fraudsters in those states.

The SP Bhopal unit Gurkaran Singh informed Free Press "The hacked or cloned accounts are being used to request monetary help from FB friends of the original FB account holder in the name of having lost a job or even being admitted to hospital ICU”.

He further added “the fraudsters did not take the money in first hand, they will ask to deposit the amount in some other platform and from there to another and after crossing 3 to 4 accounts they finally took the many in their own account. This is done to protect themselves from being caught in the eyes of the investigation agencies’.