Man poses as VP to seek favours from bureaucrats; held

NEW DELHI: The Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police has arrested two persons including an Italy-based Indian citizen from the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport for posing as Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar for duping people.

The accused have been identified as Gagandeep Singh currently living in Italy's Offanengo and Ashwani Kumar.

According to the officials, both accused made a WhatsApp profile of senior government officials to send messages to other government officials.

Gagandeep was using the picture of the country's Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar.

On the basis of inputs, the team started working on all technical aspects.

"Immediately raids were conducted and one person namely Ashwani Kumar was apprehended who shared OTP for WhatsApp account. After an extensive hi-tech investigation, human intelligence and analysing of technical details provided by social media platforms, the accused was identified as an Indian national namely Gagandeep Singh (Jammu) who was living in Italy. The team collected details about the accused from FRRO, Banks and the regional passport office," the official said on Monday.

IFSO further said that before creating the impersonating WhatsApp account of the Vice President of India, Gagandeep watched various YouTube videos.

"He got contact details of senior government officials from the internet. After that, he obtained OTP to create a WhatsApp account of an Indian mobile no. to create a WhatsApp account from Ashwani Kumar. After creating a WhatsApp account, he put pictures of the Vice President of India as a profile picture. Using this impersonating account, he started sending messages to senior government officials to seek favours from senior bureaucracy," the official statement said.