A global news agency Reuters’s Journalists Raphael Satter, Christopher Bing, and Jack Stubbs has published a story about a worldwide spy racket and the man behind it. Unfortunately, Mr. Arvind Kumar, an innocent man, was mentioned as the leading person of the racket and hacking thousands of email accounts. The inaccurate reporting by Raphael Satter and his companions ruined an innocent life.
“They lied, the journalists deliberately did it“. Reuter’s journalists Raphael Satter, and his companions mentioned a common small-scale businessman as a popular hacker and justified the whole action as a goof-up.
By facts, the US government wanted a hacker named Sumit Gupta. He was accused of hacking and spying on 10,000 email accounts. Moreover, he spied on several political accounts and investors around the globe.
According to an article in The Print, Raphael Satter and two other journalists came to India and published the story about the popular wanted hacker. One of these journalists captured a picture of an innocent man and addressed him as a wanted criminal.
The poor man showed his identity proof and tried to prove his innocence. However, these journalists forcefully took the picture and published it in the story. To complete the story, they took Arvind Kumar’s picture and showed him as a criminal.
Eventually, this deliberately affected an innocent life. After Mr. Arvind Kumar’s picture was published, he suffered several business losses, embarrassment and inquiries from security authorities. He was questioned by agencies and police several times. Consequently, he has to move to a small town and leave the city. The whole incident affected Mr Kumar’s life badly.
Reuter’s claim about the incident
Later, Reuters accepted the mistake and claimed it was a goof-up during the story publishing. It was a clear attempt to make the story ” eye catchy, but the reuter’s claim about it was a little small. They claimed that the addresses of Mr. Kumar and the hacker Gupta were the same, which proved to be a false statement.
The inquiry authorities found no solid evidence in the whole story published by Raphael Satter and his companions. While this entire incident almost ruined an innocent person’s business, social circle and future.
About the claim of the same address, the journalists who came to check the facts didn’t pay a visit to the office of Mr. Kumar. When Arvind Kumar’s picture was captured, he was sipping tea outside the building. Raphael Satter and his team took the picture forcefully and left.
Such incidents may look common or not specific to our hectic life routines. But these yellow journalism stories are horrifying for the victim and ultimately distort his life with eternal impact.
Google search links and Kumar’s picture
Reuter’s story about Kumar made another harsh impact on his life. After the Reuters claim, several other news websites shared the story. It led to showing the picture of Arvind Kumar against the Hacker Gupta searches on Google. Similarly, The hacker that led the belltrox, which is one of the largest spy-for-hire operations ever exposed, according to the description by Reuters, misidentifies Arvind as Gupta on Google.
The director of Bellatrix and Sumit Gupta’s involvement in it as a leading character was research at the Citizen lab. They only mentioned Sumit as the hacker, and they didn’t represent any picture of him. While Raphael Satter and his team’s mistake led to the image of Arvind expressed as Sumit Gupta.