The Cyber Police have registered FIR against unknown people for an attempt to disgrace Mumbai Police through fake accounts after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput.
Mumbai police’s cyber unit found that posts were uploaded on social media platforms from different countries, such as Italy, Japan, Poland, Slovenia, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Romania and France. Mumbai police commissioner has asked the cyber cell to investigate and register cases under the Information Technology Act.
“The number could be 8,000 or 80,000. At present it’s difficult to determine the exact number of such accounts that used proxy servers to show they were being posted from foreign locations,” a police officer said.
Although Mumbai police are looking into the fake online account mater, “The fake accounts will be in thousands. We are collecting details. These accounts were used to do false propaganda and to malign the police force for the last few months,” city police chief Parambir Singh said.
Investigations by cyber police have found that since the actor’s suicide, fake accounts were created to demoralise Mumbai police. “The police commissioner has been trolled with abusive contents on the official Instagram handle and other official online media handles. And all the abusive messages to Mumbai police were hashtagged with the late actor’s name,” said a police officer.
Reacting to reports of AIIMS having ruled out the possibility of murder, Singh said, “We had investigated this case very professionally. The CBI has created a panel of AIIMS doctors who have justified our investigation and the findings of Cooper hospital and forensic laboratory. Except for a few people, nobody else was aware of our investigation still many have criticized the investigation.”
Mumbai cyber DCP Rashmi Karandikar told TOI, “There are multiple fake social media account holders trolling the Mumbai police commissioner on different platforms and are using abusive language against him and the force. Hence an FIR has been registered against those account holders under Section 67 of IT Act,” she said. “Earlier, an FIR was registered on September 2 against a suspect who used a morphed image of the official Twitter account of Mumbai police commissioner and through it posted derogatory contents. We have started the probe in both matters,” said Karandikar.
“Initially, the cyber police had asked to block all the accounts and the messages. Now we have started collecting details of accounts,” an officer said.
The fake accounts were used to troll the police commissioner’s social media handle with hashtags like #JusticeForSSR and #SushantConspiracyExposed.
The unknown account holders have been booked under the Information Technology Act for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form. The offence attracts a maximum punishment of 5 years and with fine which may extend to Rs 5 or 10 lakh.
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