Hackers drive stars to cops in desperation

MUMBAI: Social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook are proving to be a nightmare for some Bollywood stars.

First, Riya Sen admitted that her email account had been hacked, and now Shamita Shetty has approached the Mumbai police cyber crime cell with the same complaint. The internet pranksters traced both the email IDs from Facebook accounts of Riya and Shamita.

Some days ago, actor Paresh Rawal too had lodged a complaint with the cyber crime cell, which is still investigating the matter. Rawal’s complaint alleged that a “fraud” has created his fake profile on social network sites, Facebook and Orkut.

Mahesh Bhatt, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor have apparently been miffed for a while with pranksters creating fake profiles on the social networking sites using their identities. However, none of them have lodged a formal complaint with the police. Sources in the cyber crime cell admitted that several stars have approached them with the same complaint, but have dithered from registering a formal complaint.

“We have received similar complaints in the past, but some of the stars have not lodged a complaint. The stars who have lodged a formal complaints with us include Paresh Rawal and Shamita Shetty,” said an officer at the Cyber crime cell.  

Shamita Shetty, when contacted, admitted that she has just lodged a police complaint after the email ID was hacked. “I have an account on Facebook where I had declared my Hotmail email ID while creating my page. But I didn’t know that the account I have been using for nine years got hacked soon after. I tried to write to Hotmail but later decided to lodge a police complaint about it,” said Shamita.

“I will be creating a new ID soon. I don’t want to be off from the networking site. I will have to find a way out of it,” she added.

Riya Sen, in fact, found that three of her email IDs got hacked in a matter of 72 hours.

In Paresh Rawal’s case the IP address of the prankster was traced to the US. “Some guy sitting there in the US had created a fake profile in my name on Facebook and was happily sending out messages in my name. The page became so popular that I started receiving calls from my relatives and friends that they have spotted me on Facebook. It was alarming. It was then I registered a complaint with the police,” Rawal said. /R

According to cyber crime experts, it’s very easy to hack or block into e-mail IDs.

“If the passwords are simple and you have put obvious answers to the security questions while creating the email IDs, it’s not a big deal to hack into it. A few months back, a leading actor approached me with the same problem. And using fake profiles are obviously cases of fraud which the police needs to track down,” said Vijay Mukhi, president, Foundation for Information Security and Technology (FIST).