Fake Instagram Account of Colonel Sofiya Qureshi Racks Up Over 390K Followers

Claim

The official Instagram account of Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who co-led the press briefings on Operation Sindoor with Wing Commander Vyomika Singh.

The archived version of the account can be seen here, which has 392K followers at the time of publishing this article.

Fact

Newschecker noticed that the account, despite claiming to be official, made no attempts to procure a verified badge and had 21 usernames prior to the current one, indicating that it may not be authentic.

The Press Information Bureau’s (PIB) Fact-Check unit had on May 10 flagged Colonel Qureshi and Wing Commander Singh’s impersonator accounts on X ,  urging users to rely only on official sources for authentic information, while clarifying that “there is no official X handle of Wg. Cdr. Vyomika Singh and Col. Sofiya Qureshi.”    

Newschecker then reached out to Colonel Sudhir Chamoli, Army PRO, who clarified that the Instagram account posing to be Colonel Qureshi was fake.

We had earlier analysed a slew of imposter accounts of Colonel Qureshi and Wing Commander Singh on X, describing how the fake handles worsened the mis/disinformation landscape around Operation Sindoor.

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Source
Conversation with Colonel Sudhir Chamoli, Army PRO