delhi

Updated: Jun 03, 2019 08:58 IST

An IIT graduate was arrested for cheating people through a website that fraudulently claimed that the re-elected Narendra Modi government was distributing free laptops to 20 million people, police said Sunday.

The suspect, 23-year-old Rakesh Jangid, aimed to not only earn from the advertisements that would flood the website, but also collect personal data of people registering there and sell them, said Anyesh Roy, deputy commissioner of police (cyber crime unit).

At last count, the website, www.modi-laptop.wishguruji.com, had garnered 1.52 million page views and the advertisements on it were clicked 68,000 times, said the DCP.

Police said that Jangid promoted the website through WhatsApp groups. It was so popular that social media sites had many people seeking help of fake news busters authenticate the scheme.

Delhi Police commissioner, Amulya Patnaik, credited the recently established Cyber Prevention Awareness and Detection (CyPAD) unit for the bust.

The unit had taken note of the fake scheme, registered a case and used technical assistance to identify the suspect and arrest him from his hometown in Nagaur district of Rajasthan on Sunday. By late evening, his cousin,Niranjan was caught.

The DCP said that Jangid misused Google’s Adsense, a program that allows website owners and bloggers to make money by displaying ads. “Since the advertisement about free laptops was attractive, the website would get more traffic and hence more ads. He would receive 68% of revenue earned from the ads,” said the DCP. The plan also was to collect the elaborate details of millions of people and sell them to cyber criminals, said the officer.

Refusing to name the IIT from where Jangid graduated, the DCP said that he had completed a five-year integrated course in economic sciences this year.