Public Instagram account, vulgar captions: Memes turned nightmare for this Varanasi family

A Facebook user has claimed that the photos of his cousin and differently-abled uncle were lifted off their Instagram account to create memes and turn them into a subject of mockery.

Sudhanshu Pandey said on Facebook that a parody account ‘Sanjay Kapoor’ on Instagram portrayed his cousin as a naïve teenager, who gets repeatedly catfished by an older man, Durgesh. They live in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi city.

Pandey said the person introduced as Sanjay was, in fact, his cousin Durgesh and the elderly man who “catfishes” him is the 19-year-old’s differently-abled father, Sanjay.

A catfish is a person who creates a fake profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes.

Durgesh and his “catfishing chronicles” have become a butt of jokes on social media with people churning out vulgar memes that soon began doing the rounds on popular meme pages on Facebook.

“The moment I saw those memes, I was shocked. The person in them was my brother and my uncle,” the 22-year-old Kanpur student told the Hindustan Times.

“I reached out to the page administrators and informed them of the incident and they gracefully obliged to take the posts down,” he added.

Following the incident, Pandey said his brother has detached himself from social media and rues why he had not made his account private. His family has refused to file a complaint of cybercrime fearing legal hassles.

“They also have to take care of my uncle, who has already undergone two brain surgeries. If the family spends their time fighting court cases, how will they take care of him?” he asked.

All their photos have been deleted from the Instagram account and the memes have stopped. But Pandey is confident that one day he will get hold of the person.

“The scammers used social media to malign his family. I’ll use the same to salvage their good name,” he said.