Fake accounts of UPSC toppers have been circulating on social media
The final results of the Union Public Service Commission’s (UPSC) Civil Services Examination (CSE) were released on Monday. The highly competitive CSE 2021 exam was aced by 685 candidates. These candidates will be placed in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Indian Foreign Service (IFS), and Indian Police Service (IPS), among other services, in the near future.
Women dominated the CSE 2021 exam. Shruti Sharma of Delhi took first place, followed by Ankita Agarwal of West Bengal and Gamini Singla of Punjab. Women have claimed the top three positions in the UPSC civil service examinations for the first time in seven years.
Along with congratulatory messages, the exam winners were confronted with a slew of fake social media accounts created in their names, as they were every year. These statements were made within 24 hours of the announcement of the results. A number of IAS and IFS officers have warned people not to fall for these hoaxes.
In 2020, IAS officer Somesh Upadhyay tweeted about the phenomenon, saying, “When real UPSC toppers come to create accounts on social media, they will not find any username.”
“There are a lot of fake accounts being made on my name on Twitter and many times these fake accounts are able to gain a lot of followers #UPSC,” Shruti Sharma wrote on her Twitter account (@ShrutiSharmaUP) on Tuesday.
However, it was unclear whether this was the original account of UPSC topper Shruti Sharma. Aishwarya Sheoran, the former Miss India who finished 93rd in the 2019 UPSC exams, filed a FIR with the Colaba police station in Mumbai in 2021 after discovering more than 20 fake accounts in her name.
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