Mumbai Crime: Man hacks into teen's FB account, chats with her pals

Officers from Cyber police station arrested a 26-year-old mobile shop owner from Bhandup for hacking into an 18-year-old girl's Facebook account. The accused has been identified as Dilip Kumar Kesarwani. He was arrested based on a complaint filed by Mahim resident Mugdha Shinde in March.

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In her complaint, Shinde, daughter of a policeman, told the cops that since January she wasn't able to log into her Facebook account. However, she did not pay much attention to it. It wasn't until her friends told her that they chatted with her on the social networking site, Shinde realised that her account had been hacked following which she approached the cyber crime cell.

Account hacked
Investigation revealed that Kesarwani used a pre-paid SIM card number to hack into Shinde's account and change its password so that she could no longer access it.

Last December, one of Kesarwani's customers returned a SIM card purchased from him stating that every time he re-inserted the card into his handset, he would receive Facebook notifications and SMSes. Kesarwani gave the customer a fresh SIM and kept the ‘problematic' card for himself.

When the cops questioned Shinde why did she register a non-operational number while opening a Facebook account last year, she said the number then belonged to one of her acquaintances, who later discontinued it.

"Using that number, he hacked into the girl's account and changed the password. Kesarwani then sent 150 friend requests between December 2015 and January 2016 by changing her name. However, he retained the complainant's picture," another officer said.

Kesarwani was arrested after the cops traced the IP address via his mobile network service provider and nabbed him from Bhandup.

He was booked under relevant sections of the IPC and IT Act. He was produced in the court and is currently out on bail.