News Outlets Fall For Arshad Nadeem's Fake Account Congratulating Neeraj Chopra

We found that the account was previously using 'Saeed Anwar' as its username and '@CSS_25' as its handle.

India won its first Gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics on Saturday, 7 August, after Neeraj Chopra delivered a splendid performance to win the men's Javelin final.

But soon after the big victory, a tweet by an account in the name of Pakistani athlete Arshad Nadeem, congratulating Chopra, started doing the rounds. Nadeem was competing with Chopra and he finished fifth in the competition.

This tweet was then picked up by several news outlets including Times Now, NDTV Hindi, Loksatta, Live Hindustan among others. However, the tweet was from an impostor account and not an official one.

CLAIM

A tweet by '@ArshadNadeemPak' congratulating Chopra, referring to him as his "idol" started doing the rounds. The tweet read, "Congratulations to my Idol #NeerajChopra for winning. Sorry Pakistan I could not win for you. #ArshadNadeem (sic)."

Various news organisations like Times Now, Live Hindustan, Loksatta published a story on the tweet claiming that it was indeed from the athlete. NDTV Hindi was also among the news outlets to have picked up the story. However, the story has now been taken down.

The New Indian Express and Latestly, too, published a story by news agency IANS on the said tweet. Indian and Pakistani users also believed that the tweet was from an official account.

Some of the archived versions can be seen here, here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

While going through the interactions with the tweet, we came across a tweet by a user who had mentioned that the account's previous name was 'Saeed Anwar (CSS_25)'.

We then searched for the profile on Twitter and found one reply in which the current handle 'ArshadNadeemPak' was mentioned.

We then ran a Google search for '@CSS_25' and came across a cached version of the profile. The profile name was 'Saeed Anwar' and the bio mentioned 'Professional cricketer , played for @TheRealPCB (sic)'.

TWITTER IDS: VOILA! IT'S A MATCH!

Next, we found the Twitter ID of the current 'ArshadNadeemPak' profile and matched it with the previous 'Saeed Anwar' profile.

Remember, a Twitter ID is unique to each account and no two accounts can have the same ID.

We used an online tool called TweeterID.com to find out the ID of the current account (1393466073975083008) and matched it with the Twitter ID of the cached version of the profile that we had found.

(Note: Swipe right to check the screenshot of the cached version)

TWITTER PROFILE HAS NOW UPDATED ITS BIO

The Twitter profile (archived version here) had earlier identified itself as the 'official account' of Nadeem, but after being called out the Twitter bio was updated to read, "Record Holder of South Asian Games in Javelin Throw with a distance of 86.29m." Archived version can be seen here.

Clearly, multiple users on social media and news outlets fell for an impersonator account of Arshad Nadeem.

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