A million followers and picture-perfect scam

NEW DELHI: Since 2016, he had been posing as a woman and creating social media accounts by stealing pictures from the profiles of “attractive” women to get followers. He would take money from men on the pretext of promoting them and their brands. Once such Instagram account of this 33-year-old graduate had even crossed a million followers.
The accused, Akash Choudhary, targeted at least three men every week and made them pay through online wallets to make it difficult for police to zero in on him. He has cheated people of several lakhs and more than 15 cases have been worked out with his arrest. The fraud came to light when the woman, whose pictures were being used by Choudhary in his main account, got to know about it. One of her friends alerted her when a product’s promotion popped up on her feed.

The woman dropped a message to the account’s admin and asked him to take down the pictures or she would inform the cops, but he instead threatened her saying if she does not share more pictures with him he would use her images for advertisements of escort services. The scared woman sent a few pictures, but when he became more demanding she informed police. DCP (southeast) Chinmoy Biswal said that a team led by ACP (operations) K P Singh was formed to crack the case.

“The complainant said that her pictures were being used on several fake accounts for promoting brands by posting advertisements. A few accounts were also promoting escort and prostitution sites,” said apolice officer. Choudhary was found running a meat shop in Gurugram and arrested.

During interrogation, he said that he was a commerce graduate from Patna University and had shifted to Delhi in 2004. He had purchased a separate SIM card and smartphone to operate these accounts. He started by downloading profiles of women from Instagram and Facebook. After collecting almost 60 pictures, he started shortlisting them and created fake accounts. He then invited men to connect and accepted every request he got. The accused downloaded mobile wallets and used them through fake IDs. He linked the wallets with his genuine bank account in Gurugram to transfer the money and withdraw it.

After raising a huge number of followers, Choudhary had even contacted genuine companies and brands for promotion of their product. He was in constant touch with almost seven companies for promotion of products.