Post the death of Sushant Singh Rajput many social media accounts made their suspicious appearance online.
The fake accounts passed defamatory posts on the Mumbai Police, the Government and commissioner of police, Param Bir Singh.
Earlier, the cybercrime department of the Mumbai Police had found over 50k such social media accounts. However, the Police say that the count of these accounts have now crossed over 1.5 lakh. As per a report, the accused used a paid program and proxy servers to remain anonymous and divert eyes of law enforcement agencies.
Using various different hashtags, many negative remarks were passed on by these accounts about state government, Mumbai Police and the Commissioner of Police.
A press release stated, “During the investigation, we found that these fake accounts are controlled by a “BOT”. A single BOT program, which is a commercial tool and used for negative trending, has the power of 500 tweets/retweets per request and a huge capacity of 5 million tweets per month. These are paid programs which have the power to tweet in any language and can be executed from any part of the world using proxy server to remain anonymous.” The report was submitted by a team of cyber and forensic experts.
“At present, many accounts are trying to disappear. Many of them are deleting the negative posts, comments and tweets to evade the investigation process. A major percentage of the accounts are operating outside India in countries like China, Panama and Nepal,” added the release.
The report was generated using artificial intelligence and machine learning for the analysis of hashtags and related accounts which were created or surfaced between June 2020 and October 2020 to trend against dignified personalities.
Almost 80 per cent of these 1.5 lakh accounts were suspicious as they were majorly making negative tweets and comments and their activities surprisingly showcased a drastic leap in the number of tweets per day and number of followers which normally would be a hard target to achieve.