“Dear Omar Abdullah. why are you wasting your career on Twitter. You are CM of a state and need to be careful while speaking”. This message on social networking site Twitter sparked a flurry of conversations last month, denouncing
and ridiculing the “sender”, senior BJP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Arun Jaitley, for his snorty and somewhat inappropriate demeanour.
When the senior BJP leaders and his close associates checked with Mr Jaitley, it turned out that he didn’t have a Twitter account and that an impostor was using his name to create unnecessary controversy.
On Tuesday, Mr Jaitley approached the crime branch of Delhi police with a complaint against the impostor and got a case registered under Information Technology Act 2000 against the culprit.
Mr Jaitley told the cyber crime branch that an account in the name of @jaitleyarun was created on Twitter website and that the said account, which has 1,703 followers, prominent among them senior Congress leader and former minister Shashi Tharoor, has not been created by him.
“The account does not belong to me. It appears that someone has created a fake account in my name. This impersonator has also put my photograph and is following other people on Twitter as if he is me,” Mr Jaitley stated in his complaint to the crime branch.
Police sources said that the fake owner of the account is also spreading “defamatory” information about Mr Jaitley in the cyberspace which had become a source of embarrassment for the senior BJP leader. “We have registered a case against the offender and investigations are underway to identify and arrest him,” a senior crime branch official said.