MUMBAI, Feb. 28 -- A Mumbai-based class 12 student, Aahana Parikh, has filed a complaint with the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal against the Instagram handle Mindfaces, run by content creator, Jai Shah, who has 233,000 followers, alleging that he had copied study notes freely available on the State Council of Educational Research and Training's (SCERT) website and sold them to students for Rs.1,800 each as exclusive study material. She was one of the many students who bought the material not knowing that it was already made available by the government. Soon, many similarly affected students spoke up and the issue snowballed into a dispute between Shah and another influencer, Pooja Gupta, who has also built a following based on sharing informative content for students through her Instagram handle Mumbai colleges. Gupta has over 40,000 followers. Gupta posted a video on Mumbaicolleges in support of students and the alleged fraud, following which Shah sent a legal notice to Gupta accusing her of defamation. In the complaint against Mindfaces, Parikh alleged that the Mindfaces had launched an 'Insiders Programme' through its broadcast channel, claiming to provide exclusive study notes. She stated that she was added to the fifth group, which had around 700 members, and each member was charged Rs.1,800. According to her complaint, which HT has seen, there were about 15 such groups. This means that around 10,500 students were enrolled and an estimated Rs.1.89 crore was collected by Shah. Parikh further stated that while the content was being sold as "exclusive" the PDFs shared with students were notes from the SCERT website. The notes, she claimed, were freely available on Google and other public platforms. She added that the original SCERT watermark was removed from the documents and replaced by Mindfaces branding before being put in circulation. Underlining that students were misled into believing that they were purchasing exclusive premium content, she submitted the complaint for appropriate review requesting a full refund to all affected students. Based on students' complaints, Gupta posted a video on her Instagram handle expressing her support for them. Shah responded with a legal notice for defamation. "There is no question of any defamation, as I have only presented facts," said Gupta. "Students approached me after learning that they were cheated by another influencer. I posted the video to support the students." When HT reached out to Shah, he said, "We never confirmed if parts of our content shared through Mindfaces will be available elsewhere. Only select students of science might have experienced this. All our PDFs were not taken from the source; besides, students enrolled voluntarily after reading the guidelines. Moreover, the modus operandi and framework under which we work is akin to that carried out by other social media handles of the same niche."...