TV actor gets death threats

TV actress Aashka Goradia receives death threats and vulgar messages on her Facebook fan page, culprit traced to Gurgaon.

Aashka Goradia, who plays the vamp, Kalavati, in Laagi Tujhse Lagan on Colors, recently had an awful experience on the social networking website, Facebook, as she faced virtual threats to her life while someone posted obscene comments on her fan page.

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Online harassment
“On March 3, I came across some comments that contained foul language and even threats to my life, posted on my fan page on Facebook. I could not delete them because I am not the administrator of the page. All my fans were reacting strongly to it. Soon, the person behind this started abusing my fans too,” Goradia recounts.

She approached the police at Bandra-Kurla Complex and filed a FIR. The cyber-crime cell then contacted Facebook authorities and notified them of the issue. But after two weeks of waiting, she decided to take matters into her own hands and hired professional hackers to track down the offender. The hackers managed to trace the account user to Gurgaon. The Mumbai police then approached the Jharkhand police for help, who promptly took action and arrested a 17-year-old boy named Siddharth who confessed to the crime.

He was sent to a children’s remand home in Dongri. He had created a fake profile of Katrina Kaif and used it to post threats to Goradia. Siddharth said he and his friends had decided to threaten actresses and so he posted those comments on Goradia’s fan page. But Goradia smells a rat and says, “Why did he target only me? My name is anyway so uncommon that people have difficulty pronouncing it. I am sure he did not target me simply by chance.”

Culprit backs out
In a turn of events, the boy now denies posting the comments. Goradia has now hired criminal lawyers to press charges against the boy and make him reveal the truth.

Goradia says, “I think this has been done by somebody who knows me. Somebody wants to tarnish my image and after reading the posts, I have a feeling that this could be the work of a woman. Siddharth is clearly hiding somebody’s name and I will make sure I catch the person responsible for this.”

Goradia continues to use social networking websites, as she says it helps actors connect with their fans easily. “I went through two months of agony, but the ratio of such occurrences is too low for me to stop using Facebook. I will not stop interacting with 5,000 fans because of one person.”

However, she plans to ensure that Siddharth is punished and people are deterred from such activities.