Hyd techie held for impersonating woman on Facebook, fraudulently extracting money

The police in Hyderabad have arrested a man for logging into a woman's Facebook account in an unauthorised manner and attempting to extract money from her friends, while impersonating her. Rachakonda Cyber Crime police said that the accused, identified as 24-year-old Bathula Venkateswarlu, was a resident of Jillelaguda. A B.Tech graduate, the police said that Venkateswarlu was presently working at a Madhapur-based computer graphics firm. In her complaint, the woman said that she was unable to login to her Facebook account from September 2019, and added that someone was trying to extract money from her online friends on the false pretext of her medical treatment. She came to know about this after one of her Facebook friends reached out to her personally."During interrogation, Venkateswarlu confessed to have sent a link from a phishing website (spoofed site) and stolen the user ID and password of the victim's Facebook account. Using her credentials which she unsuspectingly entered, he then logged into the account, changed the password, recovery email address and phone number and took control of it," the police said in a press note."He then, impersonating her, began chatting with some of her online friends through Facebook messenger and asked for money in small sums to pay for medical bills, mentioning that she was falling short of money as she met with a road accident. Those who believed the version to be true, asked for bank account details to transfer funds to lend help. The accused shared his bank account details. Efforts are on to identify other victims too," the police added. In an advisory, police asked citizens to be wary of links, unless they were from trusted sources, and said that it was always better to go for two-step authentication (which includes an OTP or verification code that will be sent to the phone for every login). Read: How Hyderabad's unique gourmet culture helped the city get a UNESCO tag