Govt blocked 129 betting sites on fake High Court orders, FIR filed

New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh Police have registered a case against unidentified persons after the Allahabad High Court found that an order carrying its name, used by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to block 95 betting websites, was forged.

It is one of two instances this year in which the DoT asked internet service providers to block betting sites on the basis of court orders that turned out to be fake, according to a Reuters investigation. The second order was attributed to the Rajasthan High Court. 

Between them, the two orders led to 129 websites being blocked.

Neither order appears in the registration records of the two courts, Reuters found.

FIR for forgery, cheating

The Allahabad High Court administration filed a police complaint on November 6 after it was asked to verify the document. The first information report (FIR) invokes provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) on cheating, forgery, forging court records and passing off forged documents as genuine, along with sections of the IT Act.

The fake order was dated August 14 and bore the name of Justice Garima Prashad. According to police records, the judge’s office confirmed that “no such order has been passed by Her Ladyship.”

A senior state cybercrime official, Ghanshyam Yadav, told Reuters that the order was not genuine and that no arrests had been made.

How the orders got through

A man calling himself advocate Kartikey Pandey emailed the document to officials on August 22. It carried the court’s logo, its seal and a QR code of the kind used to verify orders. Scanning the code, however, led to an unrelated webpage that showed only a case number.

Officials exchanged several emails about it, including one asking for an action taken report. On September 2, a DoT official told ISPs to take “immediate necessary action” to block the 95 sites.

The Rajasthan order had reached the DoT on the night of July 19, sent from an email ID in the name of “Aryan Chaudhary,” who was described as an advocate-on-record. Citing an IT Act provision that allows blocking for national security reasons, it demanded compliance within 24 hours. Two days later, the DoT asked ISPs to block the 34 betting sites listed in it.

The Rajasthan High Court registrar told Reuters the order “appears to be fraudulent” and was not on the court’s server.

Both blocking directions, with the forged orders attached, were still on the DoT website on Wednesday, November 11. 

Wider concern

Gambling is illegal in India, but the episode shows that forged papers can get past one of the world’s strictest content-removal systems and could be used against any organisation operating online. It is not known how the orders were made or whether artificial intelligence (AI) was used.

Fabricated legal material has been worrying courts. In July, the Supreme Court set aside a tribunal’s orders that relied on non-existent judgments. Last week, X told an Indian court that police directives it had passed on to two free-speech groups, warning of action against their accounts, had been found to be fake.

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