Vijay Mallya cries foul as Twitter account hacked

NEW DELHI: Liquor baron and former Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Mallya’s Twitter account was hacked on Friday.

A hacker group identifying itself as “Legion” claimed responsibility for the act. The group also claimed to have access to details of

Mallya

’s alleged “bank accounts, assets, passports, offshore investments” and shared a link to a partial dump of this data with his 5.5 million followers on the hacked account.

TOI has accessed the data dump of 277 files measuring 509 MB. They include purported scanned copies of Mallya’s passports and UK residency permit, player agreements for the Caribbean Premier league, valuation details of various properties owned by the industrialist, a consolidated statement of assets prepared by Swiss financial services company UBS, an account statement of Mallya’s F1team Force India and three American Express credit card bills.

TOI, however, cannot vouch for the veracity of these documents.

Legion, the group that claims to have hacked Vijay Mallya’s twittter account, did not respond to an email sent to them by TOI. The email id was provided on Mallya’s hacked Twitter account.

The tycoon’s financial and political dealings have been embroiled in controversy since he defaulted on several bank loans totalling Rs 9,000 crore. Last month, the CBI issued a non-bailable warrant and an extradition request against the UK-based industrialist. “We shall bring you more about this fraudster and conman over the course of the next few weeks,” said one of the many tweets posted from Mallya’s official verified account @TheVijayMallya.

By Friday noon, the posthacking tweets appeared to have been deleted. What remained on the account were two tweets that said: “My account has been hacked by some one (sic) called Legion who are Tweeting now in my name. Simply ignore. Will fix this. Outfit called Legion has hacked my e-mail accounts and are blackmailing me!! What a joke.” In an unauthorised tweet from Mallya’s account, Legion later rubbished the blackmailing accusation. “We did not blackmail Mallya, any and all rumours are assumptions and fake,” they wrote.