Since Indian bowler Mohammed Shami was harassed on social media following India's T20 World Cup loss to Pakistan, there has been a concerted effort to blame anonymous Pakistani accounts for Shami's harassment. Virat Kohli, the captain of the Indian cricket team, has spoken out in support of Shami and criticised people who have abused him because of his faith. 'Amena @criccrazyygirl,' a now-defunct Twitter handle, threatened to rape Kohli's daughter in a tweet. @criccrazyygirl was identified as a Pakistani bot.
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Not a ‘Pakistani’ account
To identify the account's unique Twitter ID, True Scoop News looked for archived connections to tweets by @criccrazyygirl. We looked into the source code of a tweet we found on Wayback Machine and discovered that its unique Twitter id is '1386685474182369290'. Twitter's policy permits users to change their username; however, because the numeric ID or unique ID is unique to that account, it remains unchanged regardless of the username change.
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On Twitter, we looked for replies to @criccrazyygirl and found several that went to @ramanheistThis indicates that both accounts were identical, but the username was changed.
We used the same method we used to identify @ramanheist's archived tweets on Wayback Machine and looked for the unique Twitter ID on the source code page.
We also discovered archived connections to tweets from @ramanheist discussing trading on the NIFTY, an Indian stock market index. He also forwarded an email from Zerodha, an Indian financial services firm. This indicates that the account's owner is an Indian national.
True Scoop News was able to track down the person's first account, which was @pellikuturuhere, which is a Telugu word. The guy is from Hyderabad, according to a reply to @pellikututuhere.
A further search of @criccrazyygirl's responses led us to a tweet in which a user had replied to the account, however @criccrazyygirl's tweet is no longer viewable because the account no longer exists. We looked for an archived link to the reply on Wayback Machine, but the username of @criccrazyygirl had been changed to @StellaisBihp by the time Wayback Machine crawled the tweet.
The Twitter behaviour of the individual does not indicate that they are from Pakistan. The notion that an offensive tweet was sent by a Pakistani bot account targeting Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma's daughter is baseless. The account is from India and not from Pakistan.