Delhi Police remove details of missing persons’ relatives from ZIPNET after extortion scam

Said the officer, “Following this, the changes were made within a week and the list now does not contain the phone numbers of the kin of the missing persons.”
The list, however, contains the address of the kin of the victims and the contact number of the investigating officer (IO) of the case, apart from the police station under the jurisdiction of which the person went missing.

Said the officer quoted above, “The accused commonly misuses the contact details and calls up the family of the victim in a bid to threaten and extort money from them on the pretext of knowing their location… apart from Chauhan’s case, an earlier case of a man in Dwarka extorting money on pretext of having information about the complainant’s stolen vehicle was also taken into account… we had already removed the contact details of the vehicle owners after the latter case surfaced last year.”

Chauhan, a BCA graduate, was arrested from Uttar Pradesh’s Mau for allegedly sourcing information from ZIPNET, a database intended for inter-state police coordination, and calling up at least 904 families in a span of three months, where he claimed that he was from police or the missing persons’ cell and had the missing child in his custody.

He would, thereafter, allegedly ask for money for fuel reimbursement for his vehicle or simply in lieu of sharing the missing child’s location. After receiving the money on his UPI account, he would immediately cut the call or claim that the child has fled his custody, DCP (North) Manoj Kumar Meena had earlier said.