stated that the editor had offered him a job when informed about the defacement. In 2012, the Forbes India executive editor Charles Assisi (who was editor of CHIP India at the time of the supposed incident), denied that such an incident ever took place after verifying with his predecessor and successor at the magazine as well. In a 2002 interview published on rediff.com, he stated that at the age of 16, he foiled an attempt by the Kashmiri separatist hackers to deface an Indian website. He stated he gathered information about the attackers, eavesdropped on their online chat using one of their identities, and then mailed the transcript to a US spy organisation that had hired him. He did not divulge the name of the organization he worked for, citing security reasons. The Pakistani hacker group Anti-India Crew (AIC) questioned Fadia's claims: along with WFD, the AIC hacked the Indian government website epfindia.gov.in, dedicating it to Fadia, mocking his capabilities. AIC also announced that it would be defacing the website of the CBEC within the next two days, and challenged Fadia to prevent it by patching the vulnerability but Fadia couldn't. In 2003, He claimed to have infiltrated a group of hackers and stated that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were paying "westerners" to deface Indian websites with anti-India or pro-Pakistan content. His own website has been hacked multiple times. In 2009, he blamed the defacement on a vulnerability in the servers of his webhost net4india. Independent security experts contested his claim, stating that the problem was a loophole in his own website's code. His website was hacked by an Indian hacker Himanshu Sharma, where he accepted the challenge from Ankit Fadia. In 2012, his website was defaced twice by hackers. In the first instance, the hackers rubbished his claims and stated that he was fooling people. Another hacker compromised it in response to a challenge that was issued by Fadia on the Tech Toyz show on CNBC-TV18. In 2012, DEF CON awarded him with the "Security Charlatan of the Year" award citing him to be a fraudster and his presentations outdated. The website attrition.org mentions him as a security charlatan and accuses him of plagiarism in his work. During September 2015, His official Facebook page posted a certificate which claimed that Fadia was appointed as the brand ambassador for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project, the Digital India Initiative. The