A Facebook page known as the ‘Ratan Tata Foundation’ has been manually reported by Mr. Ratan Tata himself. Ratan Tata went on his social media accounts and said that the account is fake and is not run by anyone related to the Tata Family. He went to say that the account gets in to contact with random Indian Facebook users and tells them that it is an official Tata account and uses the name of a random employee. They ask for money in exchange for some service or help. Mr. Ratan Tata says that the company will not request anyone to send them any money and they are not allowed to; especially on social media messages.
The account called themselves as a charitable organisation/account and it has swiftly been taken down by Facebook after it was revealed that the account has nothing to do with the conglomerate.
Mr. Ratan Tata put up a screenshot of the Facebook account on his Instagram stories as he asked his followers to flag the account. He put up a caption on the story saying that he wanted to inform followers and everyone else that there are fake accounts all over social media impersonating other famous people and companies. This account uses the name of many top employees of the conglomerate and asks them for money. The charitable subsidiaries of Tata will never ask for money in exchange for anything.
We do not know how many people viewed the story as Instagram story metrics are private.
He went to say that he will be taking necessary legal steps against the people running the Facebook page. He then added that people should ensure that the social media pages are officially run by Tata employees by asking for verification at talktous@tatatrusts.org.
Tata Trusts is one of Tata’s subsidiaries that solely does philanthropy and gives back to the community that helps them grow. This subsidiary has been praised by people, the government, and the media over the past few years for helping the rural communities and villages of the country.
This fake social media accounts have unfortunately taken place before multiple times with Reliance and Mahindra also experiencing this in the past. With the rise of cheap mobile phones and a stable internet connection, it has become easier to do anything online and the government along with social media companies should find ways to crackdown on this even more.