On February 2, as journalist Siddique Kappan walked out of Lucknow jail after two years of incarceration, a Twitter account emerged with his name and image, tweeting on Kappan's behalf.
BOOM found this account, currently going by the handle @SiddiqueKappan, to be an imposter. We also found evidence suggesting that the same account had earlier impersonated Rashtriya Janata Dal member Amar Paswan, and journalist Rubika Liyaqat.
Kappan walked out on Thursday, after his release order came more than three months after the Supreme Court and the Allahabad High Court had granted him bail. Kappan is required to stay in Delhi for six weeks and mark his presence before the local police station every Monday in accordance with the conditions imposed by the Supreme Court while granting him bail in September 2020. Post-six weeks, Kappan can relocate to Mallapuram, his hometown in Kerala and mark his presence with the local police station every Monday.
The account was found tweeting on Kappan's behalf on February 3, 2023, with the caption, "I'm back ✌ The people who voiced me in difficult times. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to all those who stood by me and my family. Today, after two years, I have breathed in the open air thanks to the love and support of your people. Thank you all once again❤."
View an archive of the above tweet here.
While some users spotted and called out the imposter account, we found several people falling for it and replying to the viral tweet. This included several verified handles with large following.
We also found the handle being followed by several prominent journalists and political activists.
Fake Alert: Serial Imposter!
BOOM looked through the past tweets and replies by the account, and found regular tweets being published from the handle long before Kappan's release on February 2. This would suggest that the account was tweeting on a regular basis while Kappan was still in jail without any internet access.
Between January 26-30, we found the handle responding to multiple prominent handles, including that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, tennis player Sania Mirza, journalist Abhisar Sharma, among others, with the exact same text:
"!!जय बागेश्वर बाला जी सरकार की!!
!!ॐ बागेश्वराय नमः!!
!!जय श्री राम!!"
Since the handle is still active, we used twitterid.com to ascertain the unique Twitter ID of the account, which turned out to be 1424004828603195395.
We ran the Twitter ID through a Google search and came across an article by Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Center (DFRAC), which had looked into a few imposter accounts having the same ID.
According to the article, the same ID was attributed to two different handles - @AmarPas28124530, which impersonated RJD's Amar Paswan, and @khan28124530, which impersonated ABP News anchor Rubika Liyaqat.
We searched for both the handles, and found responses to tweets by the imposter handle @SiddiqueKappan in both the cases.
Using Wayback Machine we found an archive of a tweet made by @AmarPas28124530. Inspecting the source code of the archive, we found that the handle had the same Twitter ID - 1424004828603195395 (seen below).
We did the same for an archive of a tweet made by @khan28124530, and found that this handle too had the same Twitter ID - 1424004828603195395 (seen below).
This confirms that the account running the handle @SiddiqueKappan was earlier used to run the imposter handles @AmarPas28124531 and @khan28124530.
We also reached out the Kappan's family, and the article shall be updated if and when they respond.