17-year-old from Uttar Pradesh impersonates as MP on Facebook, arrested

Hyderabad: A 17-year-old juvenile was brought to the city on prisoner transit warrant on Friday by cybercrime officials of Cyberabad police from Uttar Pradesh. The juvenile is a native of Gaon Mandaura Goverdhan, Brahmanan, U.P. and he created a fake profile of MP Santosh Kumar Joginapally. According to police, they received a complaint from a person on August 25, wherein the complainant alleged that he received a friend request from the MP on Facebook in the month of June. Upon receiving the request he was delighted and accepted the request.

After accepting the request the said juvenile started chatting with the complainant and within a few days, he demanded an amount of Rs. 50,000 for the treatment of his friend's daughter.

But the complainant did not send the money and kept on dodging the matter, however, the juvenile kept on pestering him and started sending Google Pay and PhonePe contact numbers to deposit the money.

Upon getting suspicious the complainant filed a police complaint. Based on the complaint, we started investigation and traced the juvenile accused to UP, said K Chandrashekar, Inspector of cybercrime. He said, "Upon further investigation it was revealed that the juvenile wanted to become rich in a short span of time and was influenced by movies, so he adopted such techniques to deceive the citizens by impersonating a famous personality.

The shocking thing was the juvenile impersonated the personalities in a perfect way as he would learn their language, their movements etc… by checking their social networking profiles."

The juvenile accused was brought to the city and the further course of action would be decided based upon his previous history, police said.