A few days ago, one of
Esha Gupta’s friends messaged her, “Hey babe, sad to know you lost your phone. Here’s my number.” The message raised an alarm because neither had the actress lost her phone, nor had she asked her friend for his contact number. When Esha probed the matter, she discovered that her account on a photo-sharing website had been hacked into. Not just that; it was also used to send out messages to her actor and filmmaker friends, asking for their contact details.
Talking to BT, Esha says, “It was absurd of my friend to message me his number out of the blue.
When I told him that I had not lost my phone, he told me that he had received a message from my Instagram account, asking for his number, which he found weird since I never use that platform for such communication. I then realised that there’s a problem and to my horror, what I suspected came true. Someone had used my account to send messages to all my contacts, asking for their numbers. It was scary because who knows what their purpose was.”
The actress adds, “Thankfully, my account was not used to send out nasty messages or lewd pictures to anyone. Otherwise, I would have been embarrassed and it would have created a lot of trouble.”
The actress, currently shooting for her first Iranian project in Madh Island, Mumbai, has chosen not to file a police complaint. Instead, she has terminated her contract with the agency handling her social media account when she’s at work.
Esha explains, “Filing a police complaint and following it up is too time-consuming and the process is also lengthy. I didn’t want to escalate the matter so much. Also, I had shared the password to my social media accounts only with the agency handling them. Since it’s not an obvious, easy password, I strongly suspect that someone from their end is behind this. That is the reason I have terminated my contract with them. Now, my accounts are in my control and if need be, I might hire someone to handle it for me; at least that way, if something happens, I know who’s accountable.