In a continuing series of fake Twitter accounts related to the Sushant Singh Rajput death case, two more such accounts have cropped up. This time, they are of Satish Maneshinde, the lawyer defending actress Rhea Chakraborty against the late actor’s family, as well as of Indrajit Chakraborty, her father.
The account impersonating as Maneshinde was created on 2 September, and has amassed over 3,400 followers. He tweets regularly in support of the actress and about any updates related to the her case.
Similarly, we found that the account impersonating Chakraborty changed its handle name and has been tweeting voraciously in support of “his daughter”.
But, there are multiple red flags which suggest that the accounts are fake. Further, Maneshinde confirmed to The Quint that this isn’t his official account.
Satish Manshinde
WHAT KIND OF CONTENT DOES THE ACCOUNT POST?
The Twitter account tweets regular updates on Chakraborty’s case, claiming to be her lawyer.
The user also mentions their handle while retweeting Maneshinde’s statements to the media.
The user has repeatedly mentioned another Twitter handle, @PoliceCase, which claims to be “an official account of police case india. (sic)” in its bio.
However, we found numerous red flags in both the Twitter accounts, proving that they are fake.
THE RED FLAGS
The account was recently created on 2 September 2020 and has amassed 3,455 followers since then.
Firstly, the username, @satishmaneshnde misspells the lawyer’s last name, ‘Maneshinde.’
The user has also mentioned that “This is an fn account of Satish maneshinde” (sic) in their bio.
The website linked in the user’s bio, “Satish.org” is also bogus and leads to a domain broker service that offers you to buy the particular domain name.
Further, the user’s tweets are riddled with spelling mistakes.
In the samples below, the user tweeted incorrect spellings of judicial as ‘juditial,’ definitely as ‘definately,’ and conferencing as ‘confferencing.’
The second account, @PoliceCase, which was created on 4 September, has only 83 followers.
It only follows five news agencies and the fake account of Maneshinde.
The account has only retweeted tweets from the fake account since its inception and was most likely created to gain followers.
Its pinned tweet is also riddled with similar spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, as Maneshinde’s fake account – prove’ is misspelled as ‘proove,’ and allegations as ‘alligations.’
It also uses the same hashtag (#TruthMatters) as the fake account, in its tweets.
The Quint reached out to lawyer, Maneshinde, who confirmed that @satishmaneshnde is not his official account.
He also stated that he did not have any Twitter accounts which were active.
Indrajit Chakraborty
Lt Col (Rtd) Indrajit Chakraborty is the father of Rhea and her brother Showik Chakraborty.
The account on Twitter has the handle name “@IndrajitChakra” and appears to have been created in December 2019 and has over 8,000 followers at the time this story was published.
The bio of the handle, written in Hindi, reads “Satyameva Jayate”.
WHAT KIND OF CONTENT DOES THE ACCOUNT POST?
On going through the recent tweets over the last few days, we found that the account has consistently been tweeting about Rhea and the case, as well as retweeting other prominent people who have tweeted about the media trial of Rhea.
Many of the tweets describe how he is feeling as a father to have his daughter being investigated and arrested in the case, and requesting for help.
Further, after Rhea was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau on 8 September, the account tweeted several strong statements as a “father”.
Prior to these, there have been many tweets where the account has posed as Rhea’s father and pleaded for help from all quarters.
THE RED FLAGS
On scouring through older tweets by the account, we found that in some tweets on 6 September, the account appeared to be called @WeWantRahuI, as seen in replies to tweets by the account.
We noticed the same thing in another tweet on 6 September, where the account actually quoted a statement Indrajit gave after Showik’s arrest. In a reply by another Twitter user to the tweet, it can be seen that the handle was called @WeWantRahuI.
Further, in a tweet on 3 September, the handle actually talked about itself saying that some people wanted to shut down the account @WeWantRahuI and reiterated that the person behind the account was a “true Congressman”.
Moreover, on going back to tweets prior to 6 September, we saw that none of them mentioned Rhea or being her father and were all focussed on pro-Congress and anti-Modi expressions. The immediate ones talked about the GDP data and the PUBG ban.
A glance at the older tweets also showed pro-Rahul Gandhi tweets, in keeping with the handle name.
Therefore, it is clear that the handle does not belong to Rhea’s father Indrajit Chakraborty but is of an imposter.
Earlier, accounts impersonating Rajput’s sisters had also gone viral. In one instance, Times Now ran a story based on a tweet by an impostor account of Rajput’s sister, Meetu Singh.
The Quint has also reached out to Twitter to understand the measures being taken to combat the alarmingly increasing number of fake accounts on their platform. The story will be updated as and when a response is received.
Evidently, a fake Twitter account has been created to impersonate the lawyer and the father and mislead the public.
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