Imposter Twitter Handle Crops Up In Name Of UPSC Topper Shubham Kumar

Barely hours after the Civil Services 2020 result was declared by the Union Public Service Commission, a twitter handle impersonating UPSC topper Shubham Kumar started tweeting using his name.

The imposter handle @Shubham9_IND has 'IIT Graduate Rank 1st UPSC CSE 2020' mentioned in the bio of the Twitter profile.

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BOOM spoke to Kumar who confirmed to us that the profile tweeting in his name is fake. "I have no account on Twitter, Instagram or pages on Facebook. My personal profile on Facebook is inactive since long time," Kumar told BOOM.

UPSC released the results of Civil Services exams on September 24. Shubham Kumar, a bachelor of technology graduate from IIT Bombay, topped the prestigious exam in his third attempt.

Viral Tweet In The Name Of UPSC Topper Shubham Kumar

The twitter handle @Shubham9_IND had 4,524 followers at the time this report was filed. The display picture on the impostor handle is the same used by several news reports on Kumar.

Click here to access the archived account.

A tweet from this account on September 24, 2021 reading 'Rank 1st UPSC CSE 2020 #UPSCResult' gained massive engagement.

Fact Check

BOOM contacted Shubham Kumar to get more details about his social media accounts. Speaking to BOOM, Kumar said, "There is no account of mine on Twitter and only one account on Facebook which I think I had made in 2010. I am not active on any social media platform."

Impostor Handle

BOOM went through the replies on several old tweets from the handle and found that the account was earlier named @Mahadev_Bhakt9.

We checked the twitter ID of the handle @Shubham9_IND on comment picker and found it to be 2914906963.

We found that the source code of the handle @Mahadev_Bhakt9 and @Shubham9_IND have the same ID i.e. 2914906963.

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Going through the timeline of the impostor handle, we found several communal statements tweeted in the past months. Click here and here to view archived tweets.

Shubham Kumar's real account

Kumar later created an account on Twitter and tweeted 'Hello everyone. I'm Shubham Kumar, AIR 1 CSE 2020. This is my personal account. All other accounts in my name is fake'.

He shared the details of his account with BOOM over WhatsApp.