New Delhi: Twice in July and September, the government relied on faked court orders to bring down the digital profiles of 129 illegal betting sites. A Reuters investigation has found that these orders, purporting to be from the Allahabad high court and Rajasthan high court, were not real.Yet the department of telecommunications, acting on complaints it received that cited them, ordered the blocking of web sites. And the Internet Service Providers (ISP) also complied.“A Reuters review found neither court order appears in the courts’ online registration records. After questions from the news agency, the Rajasthan high court’s registrar said in an email that the order bearing its name “appears to be fraudulent” and did not exist on its server. The court did not elaborate,” said the Reuters report by Munsif Vengattil and Aditya Kalra.When Reuters pursued the matter with the registries of both courts, it got a short message of confirmation from the Rajasthan court, acknowledging that the order “appears to be fraudulent”. The Allahabad high court registry probed the matter after the news agency asked questions, and it has “found its order was fake and filed a police complaint on November 6,” said Reuters.“It is fake. It is not a genuine order from High Court of Allahabad,” Ghanshyam Yadav, a senior state cybercrime official told Reuters.Also read: Full Text | The Building of a Censorship InfrastructureFake orders and notices have started to play havoc within Indian administrative and legal circles, as they have grown in sync with digital censorship. For instance, also on November 6, X Corp told the Delhi high court that two takedown notices received by digital rights organisations Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) and Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC.in) were sent by someone posing as the Delhi Police, and were not issued by the force itself.This set of orders came to light after SFLC.in decided to verify a takedown notice it had received with the purported source – Delhi Police. When the force did not confirm the notice to X was issued by it, SFLC and IFF approached the high court.There, the dubious nature of the “police” order sent to X came to light. The complaint sent to police itself appeared suspicious, as per SFLC.in’s disclosures.For example, the advocate behind it claimed to represent the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as per SFLC.in. It also cited unnamed court orders to back its demand for taking down several posts and entire social profiles.IFF said it had written to the RSS and got no reply, while SFLC.in had written to the Delhi Police at the email address given in the notice, which bounced back. Delhi Police corrected the email address shared on its web site but it turned out that it had not issued the notices.X Corp’s advocates said in Delhi high court that they had lodged a complaint with Delhi Police to trace the imposter.Both organisations moved the high court separately, while their cases were heard together, bringing the sequence of events to light.In the cases unearthed by Reuters, the emails were sent by “Aryan Chaudhary”, claiming to be an advocate-on-record at the Rajasthan high court and by “Kartikey Pandey”, who sent the faked Allahabad court order to officials on August 22.The Reuters report reveals that officials in the department of telecommunications discussed the letters seeking the takedown of betting sites internally before forwarding the orders authorising them to ISPs.Demands to take down content are increasingly common in India. Social media users regularly report seeing messages like “not available in India … because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content” instead of being able to access their content. The take-downs and blocks are often without any warning, notice or explanation.