Shroff faithfuls lose millions as impersonator tweets tips which fall flat
Champion jockey-turned-trainer Pesi Shroff, a self-proclaimed novice when it comes to anything even remotely related to computers, internet and hi-tech gadgets, was in for a rude shock on Monday morning when someone called him and complained that his tips on the twitter account (@pesishroff) had burnt holes in his followers’ pockets including himself.
Horse traineru00a0Pesi Shroff
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The four horses tipped through Shroff’s alleged twitter account this month — Colours Flying (Sep 1), Ancient Wonder (Sep 7), and Scarlet Pimpernel & Rembrandt (Sep 8) — all opened as favourites and, barring the last-named whose odds drifted at race time, the other three received massive support, eventually taking bets worth millions of rupees down the drain as none of them could win.
However the caller was in for a bigger shock when Pesi Shroff told him he does not even have a twitter account!
“I think he did not believe it,” Shroff told MiD DAY yesterday, “and I can understand, because even I was shocked to know that this fraudulent account against which I have lodged complaint repeatedly is still active.”
Shroff told MiD DAY that when he first came to know that someone was impersonating him on twitter, he had lodged a complaint with the cyber crime cell at Mumbai.
After some months, he again lodged another complaint at Wanowrie police station in Pune last year when he found no action was taken in the matter.
Interestingly, the twitter records of the fake Shroff account show the impersonator had twitter “conversations” with celebrities like Sidharth Mallya (July 7), Arundhati Roy (July 18) and Shah Rukh Khan (July 24).
When MiD DAY asked Shroff what he intends to do now, the star trainer said he is in Mumbai right now, and added, “I will take up the matter with Pune police immediately after I go to Pune this week.”u00a0
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