The police will produce the accused before court and seek his custody. (Representational)
Kerala police today arrested an Uttar Pradesh man, employee of a salon in Thiruvananthapuram, for allegedly creating a WhatsApp account using a customer's mobile number.
Mohammed Hassan (21), a resident of Rampur district in Uttar Pradesh, was arrested based on a complaint filed by a Thiruvananthapuram resident alleging that the accused had created a WhatsApp account from the complainant's mobile number.
A case has been registered under various sections including Section 66 C of the IT Act which deals with the offence of fraudulently making use of the electronic signature, password or any other unique identification feature of any other person and sections 468 and 471 of the Indian Penal Code.
Section 468 of the IPC deals with forgery for the purpose of cheating and section 471 deals with using as genuine a forged document.
"The complainant said Hassan recently used his mobile phone to make a call when the former visited the salon as a customer. Minutes later, an OTP arrived on the complainant's phone which Hassan conveyed to the person whom he had made a call to. The next day, the complainant received a text message on his feature phone saying that a WhatsApp account had been activated on his number," police told PTI.
The customer who became suspicious after receiving the text message approached his friends and found a WhatsApp account with a military vehicle as the profile picture. He soon filed a police complaint.
"We have registered a case and arrested him. We are yet to ascertain his motive behind creating a WhatsApp account using another man's phone number," police said.
The Intelligence Bureau and the military intelligence wing have interrogated the accused in order to ascertain whether the account was created for anti-national activities or for cyber-financial crime activities.
The police will produce him before court and seek his custody for further interrogation.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)