The BKC cyber cell on Friday registered a case of impersonation wherein an unknown person created a fake website of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The police are yet to ascertain the motive.
According to the cyber cell sources, the BSE officials approached them through an assistant commissioner of police, following which the officials were asked to report to their BKC office to lodge a complaint.
An officer requesting anonymity said, “After the BSE officials saw the fake website, they approached us through an ACP and then they reported to our office on Friday evening.”
The police claimed there could be many reasons for creating a fake version of one of the popular websites in the industry, but so far, none of the traders has approached the cops complaining of hoodwink through the fake BSE website.
“We cannot tell the motive till the time we arrest the accused but we suspect that this could be a case of some individual wishing to make quick money after getting maximum page visits by creating a fake version of the BSE. We are trying to find out the Internet Protocol (IP) address using which the accused committed the crime and have wrote to the service provider to give us the information regarding the same,” said an officer.
After the complaint was lodged, the cops have blocked the fake website. The BSE gets one of the maximum page visits because of its popularity among online traders.
“Online traders usually log onto the BSE website a number of times throughout the day. So, after creating a fake version of the BSE, the accused would have bought a premium space on Google. If anyone searches the BSE website, the fake one would get equal prominence on the Google search engine,” said an officer.
Following which, the traders would surf the website according to their convenience without knowing the authenticity of the website, as the features and the contents of the fake one is that of the original website.
The culprit could have then claimed money from Google by selling space on its website, which by then had recorded thousands of page visits.