Mumbai: The city crime branch's Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) has unearth an international racket of Social Media Marketing (SMM) which is involved in creating fake profiles on social media. The CIU on Tuesday arrested a 20-year-old Abhishek Dinesh Daude who was working a portal name www.followerskart.com. The crime branch claimed that, it is for the first time that such a racket which has international ramifications, been busted in India and formed an Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe in detail.
According to the police, fake profiles have been created on social media platforms and such profiles are then used for activities in SMM such as increasing the number of followers to project them as an influencers. Fake profiles of prominent people are also created mostly of celebrities to make money.
According to the crime branch officer, Bollywood playback singer Bhoomi Trivedi approached Mumbai police commissioner on Saturday and complaint about her fake profile on Instagram. She also complained that the such people are approaching other film personalities to activate their profiles through them.
The Mumbai Police commissioner Parambir Singh then ordered crime branch to probe the matter. On the basis of technical analysisDaude a resident of Gauri Shankar Nagar Kurla was arrested. According to the crime branch officer, Daude has so far created over 5 lakhs such fake followers for total of 176 profiles in Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook in order to fraudulently project them as influencers.
"The accused is a part of a larger international fraud racket which functions 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," said DCP Detection Nandkumar Thakur
The investigation also revealed that these fake followers are created either manually or with the help of softwares mostly called as bots.
"We have estimated more than 100 such SMM portals provide fake followers which are found operating through Indian as well as foreign internet networks and servers and 54 of them have been identified so far, ' added Thakur
Such type fake profiles and followers are being used to create rumours and panic amongst the society said an officer.
