Fake Twitter Account of NCB Officer Sameer Wankhede Emerges
The account, created in August, was called Sneha Agarwal before being changed in October.
Fact-Check | An account, which was previously known as Sneha Agarwal, has now changed its name and is pretending to be that of NCB's Sameer Wankhede.
(Photo: The Quint)
Several social media users have engaged with an imposter account claiming to be that of the zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) Sameer Wankhede, who is leading the investigation in the drugs case involving Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan Khan, among others.
The fake Twitter account is called Sameer Wankhede (@SmeerWankhede) and has over 12,000 followers despite having tweeted only six times as per the last logs of the account.
However, we found that the Twitter account is a fake one and the previous handle was called "@iSnehaAgarwal". The Twitter account was created in August and the only available tweets on the account are from Saturday, 23 October.
Sneha Agarwal or Sameer Wankhede?
Despite having created the account in August, the first available tweet by the user was from 23 October, which managed to get over 9,000 likes and over 2,500 retweets/quote-tweets. The bio for the handle said, "Zonal Director @narcoticsbureau".
All the tweets by the user have got over several thousand likes and retweets.
An archive of the post can be found here.
While going through the comments on the tweets, we found a tweet by a Twitter user called Maneesh Agarwal.
The tweet carried a screenshot of a search result for the handle "@iSnehaAgarwal". The search result lead to Sameer Wankhede's account, however, the handle still said "iSnehaAgarwal".
An archive of the post can be found here.
The Twitter handle "iSnehaAgarwal" leads to Sameer Wankhede's account.
Tweets responding to the previous account.
Tweets responding to the previous account.
Taking a cue from the comment, we conducted a Twitter advanced search of the handle "iSnehaAgarwal" for tweets posted before 1 October and the result showed the replies to present account in the name of Wankhede, "@SmeerWankhede".
(Note: Swipe right to see the screenshots.)
We also found archived tweets of the old account on Wayback Machine, and none of the tweets from the beginning of the account had anything to do with the NCB.
The Quint has reached out to Wankhede to confirm if he has a personal Twitter account and the copy will be updated if and when we get a response from him.
(With inputs from SM Hoax Slayer.)
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