Comedian Shyam Rangeela’s Account Taking a Dig at PM Modi Is Fake!

We found several red flags in the said Twitter profile to ascertain that it’s an imposter account.

An imposter Twitter account of comedian Shyam Rangeela has cropped up with as many as 38,000 followers. Image used for representation. 

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

An imposter Twitter account of comedian Shyam Rangeela has cropped up, with as many as 38,000 people following it at the time of publishing this story.

The Quint’s WebQoof team found several red flags in the said Twitter profile to ascertain that it’s an imposter account, and not an official one.

You can view the archived version here.

WHAT IS THE FAKE ACCOUNT TWEETING?

We found that the Twitter account has been sharing several tweets with hashtags like #modi_job_do, #JobKiBaat, and launching attacks on Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

You can view the archived version here.

You can view the archived version here.

The account has also been tweeting about the upcoming West Bengal elections and the Ram Mandir donation drive.

You can view the archived version here.

You can view the archived version here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We scanned through the conversations of Twitter handle @shyamrangela and found that some tweets that the account had retweeted had a common mention of the handle @nidhiyadavsp.

We came across a tweet in which a user had mentioned “@nidhiyadavsp madam ji”, while replying to a tweet shared by the imposter account in August 2020.

In another reply, we found that a user had suggested that @rakeshtikait and @nidhiyadavsp are the same people.

On searching for the Twitter handles of @nidhiyadavsp and @rakeshtikait on Google, we came across the cached versions of their profiles. Interestingly, we found the following things common with @shyamrangela:

• Account created in April 2020
• Location: Lucknow
• Similarities in author bio

Left: @shyamrangela. Middle: @rakeshtikait. Right: @nidhiyadavsp.

We then found the Twitter ID of @shyamrangela: 1249510577971445762 with the help of Tweetbeaver, an application

Since we had the cached links, we searched for the same Twitter ID on codes of @nidhiyadavsp and @rakeshtikait.

Code of webcache page of imposter account @nidhiyadavsp

Code of webcache page of imposter account @rakeshtikait

It is pertinent to note that the official Twitter handle of comedian Shyam Rangeela is @ShyamRangeela, which is also linked to his verified Facebook account.

Further, the accounts mentioned are not the official accounts of Samajwadi Spokesperson Nidhi Yadav and Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) leader Rakesh Tikait. Their official verified handles are @nidhiyadav26 and @RakeshTikaitBKU respectively.

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