Techie held for unauthorised access to woman's social media

A 24-year-old techie was arrested here for "illegally accessing" a woman's social media account and misusing it, police said on Sunday.

According to a police press release, the accused unauthorisedly logged into the woman's Facebook account and attempted to extract money from her friends online, under the false pretext of paying for her medical treatment.

Based on the complaint of the woman that since September 2019, she could not login into her Facebook account and someone was trying to extract money from her friends, a case was registered.

The complainant stated that one of her Facebook friend's informed her of the request for money.

During the course of investigation, based on the technical evidence, the accused was identified and arrested on Saturday.

The accused confessed to have sent a link from a phishing website (spoofed site) and stole the user ID and password of the victim's Facebook account, police said.

Using her credentials which she unsuspectingly entered, the accused logged into it, changed the password, recovery email address and phone number and took control of it.

The accused then chatted with some of her online friends through Facebook messenger and sought money in small sums to pay medical bills by mentioning that she had an accident, police said. Those who believed the version to be true, asked for bank account details to transfer funds to lend help following which the accused shared his bank account details.