A Mumbai date, a Rs 18,000 bill, and a police raid: Inside a dating app scam

“Let’s head to this café. It’s hardly 100 metres from here…” Mahima, dressed in a black-and-brown top paired with straight pants, told Pankaj as they met on the side of a road.

Just a bit taller than 5 feet, Mahima was fair-skinned and had a stout build offset by disarming facial features. She hopped on to Pankaj’s car and guided him towards their destination.

Club Café, the signboard announced as Bollywood music blared from the sound system.

The card machines used at a club in Saki Naka in Mumbai to extort money from unsuspecting victims of the dating app scam

Before heading in, Pankaj put on a facemask. “I wasn’t unwell. I just wanted to cover my face to be safe,” Pankaj, who lives in Khar, recalled. Pankaj is 38 years old while Mahima is 18.

From inside, the café was dimly lit and garishly furnished. Multiple ceiling fans whirred on as patrons – six-seven of them — waited underneath for their orders to arrive.

But that was not all there was to the venue. Right next to the sparsely stocked bar was a door leading to a large, windowless room with white walls and soft yellow lights. This was the AC section, reserved for couples needing privacy – a much-coveted feature in a city notorious for its cramped spaces.

Pankaj suggested they sit in this section. “There was some argument going on between the café staff and a customer there,’’ Pankaj recalled. Mahima wanted to sit in the non-AC section. “So, that is where we went.”

“Once we sat around a tiny table, Mahima began the small talk,’’ Pankaj said. “She was calm and confident. She asked regular questions… about my family, my business, hobbies…” All this while, she was glued to her phone, texting non-stop. And then, she began ordering her drinks: Tequila shots, one after the other. “Within half an hour, she downed six of them!” Pankaj recalled. She also ordered a plate of crispy vegetables, French fries and a pack of cigarettes while Pankaj settled for an energy drink. He had not come here to get sloshed.

Within 40 minutes of the start of their date, Pankaj and Mahima’s conversation was interrupted by the café manager. He informed them that their bill had already exceeded Rs 15,000, Rs 18,616 to be precise, which needed to be paid immediately. As if on cue, Mahima stood up and said she wanted to make a phone call to her mother. “But I asked her to wait till the bill arrives’’, said Pankaj.

The bill was the priciest he had ever seen. “Each tequila shot was priced at Rs 3,000. They had charged another thousand bucks for the cigarette pack. Mahima had barely taken out one cigarette from it,’’ said Pankaj.

Now it was Pankaj’s turn to send out a text. Within seconds, Inspector Sushant Bandgar, who was waiting outside in civvies, trooped in with his team. He commanded the café staff, and the customers, to stay put wherever they were.

The jig was up.

“I knew Mahima had not had any drinks. Those tequila shots? Just plain water,’’ said Pankaj.

Pankaj was, in fact, a decoy. He knew the game all along and had willingly decided to play a part in it. He had personal reasons to do so.

The story of this “romantic date” began long before Pankaj downloaded the dating app. He runs ‘Yuva Pratishthan’, an NGO in Mumbai that works in the field of education, health and social awareness with youngsters in focus.

In February, he was approached by his friend. “He told me he was duped by this gang who targeted people through dating apps. He was threatened and blackmailed inside the café,” Pankaj said. “He could not do anything.’’

Pankaj was enraged and decided to expose this gang. Along with nine members of his organisation, he subscribed to the dating app and began monitoring suspicious patterns. “We knew that whenever anybody (on the app) insisted on meeting immediately, especially in Saki Naka near the metro station, she is most likely part of this racket,’’ Pankaj said. Soon, the woman who identified herself as Mahima connected with Pankaj. As soon as the place, date and time of the meeting were finalised, Pankaj approached the Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Zone 10, Datta Nalawade. Pankaj has good rapport with the Mumbai Police because of his voluntary work. Nalawade called an officer from the Powai Police Station and asked him to form a team to conduct raids in the Saki Naka area. The choice of the police station was deliberate: Nalawade wanted to avert the possibility of a leak.

THE RAID
It was around 6.35 pm, when Inspector Bandgar and his 15-member team entered the café. The policemen saw two men yelling at a third man, who was crouching on the ground near the staircase. During questioning, the police learnt that the two men were asking the man on the ground to pay Rs 25,000. The man turned out to be a 32-year-old real estate professional who had come all the way from Thane to meet a woman he had met on the dating app recently. The similarities with Pankaj’s case were hard to miss.

The two men who were seen intimidating the Thane man were Mohsin Khan (28), a bouncer at the café, and Mayank Kataria (20), who handled the bills. The police subsequently found out the involvement of other staff members of the café: Mayur Didoria (27), Nitesh Andaskar and Jatin Kumar (24) — a resident of Shahdara, Delhi.

Like Mahima, the Thane man’s companion had also ordered multiple “drinks”, which he was being coerced into paying for.

As police talked to other patrons, a similar pattern emerged: A man in his 30s connecting with a much younger woman on a dating app, the conversation swifty moving to WhatsApp, the woman taking the initiative to meet, and asking the man to meet at this café. What followed was an unusually large drinks order from the woman and the man being asked to immediately pay up an inflated sum for it.

Police questioned Mahima and learnt it was not even her real name. A resident of Delhi, she had recently come to Mumbai and was staying at a hotel on Andheri-Kurla Road. Like Mahima’s name, the liquor stocked up in the café’s bar was also fake. “We tested it. It was all water,” said a police official.

THE GANG
On further investigation, police learnt that the racket was not just confined to Mumbai. The three women detained by the police told them that two men – Shoaib and Azim Siddiqui — from Delhi coordinated these traps with them through WhatsApp. They also said the café staff assisted them in these traps, DCP Nalawade said.

“It was actually Shoaib and Azim’s idea to lure customers through the dating app, serve the women water in the name of liquor, generate inflated bills, and extort money,” Nalawade added.

An FIR has been registered against 13 people, including three women, for cheating, criminal conspiracy, intimidation, and operating an illegal establishment. Police arrested 11 people during the raid. Authorities are also examining digital evidence, including mobile phones and CCTV footage, to identify more victims and widen the scope of the investigation.

Those arrested so far include Kataria, Didoria, Khan, Kumar, Faizal Ali (27), Deepak Das (37) and Sahil Kushwaha (19).

CAPITAL CONNECT
Shoaib and Azim from Delhi have been identified by the police as the “masterminds” of this racket. “There were 20-25 girls, aged 18 to 24, who were brought to Mumbai from Delhi. Unfamiliar with Mumbai, they all stayed at a local hotel. They mostly spent time inside the café and stepped out only when their target was about to arrive in Saki Naka,” a police officer said.

During the course of the investigation, police learnt that the women whom the victims thought they were talking to on dating apps were actually men.

“One of them (the gang members), Kushwaha, is an expert in dating app chats. It was him who, posing as a girl on the apps, identified the target and set up the date. It was only when the victim would agree to meet in Saki Naka that a girl was brought into the picture. She was given all the details of the target and asked to follow the plan,’’ a police officer involved in the probe said.

“The racket operated cleverly. As soon as the person agreed to meet, they immediately shifted the conversation to WhatsApp, unmatching the person on the dating app to erase chat evidence,’’ Pankaj said. “However, we had already secured screenshots of all the chats (he had with Mahima)”.

Police said that the investigations have pointed to an insidious racket that made use of vulnerable women from the national Capital and surrounding areas in UP to target desperate men from Mumbai. “Most of the girls came from Delhi. They needed money and that’s how they became part of this racket,’’ DCP Nalawade said.

Police said the women were paid Rs 1,000 for each “date” – a lucrative sum given that they could go on multiple such “assignments” in a day. Police believe that the racket has duped hundreds of people so far. “But just 15 complainants have come forward and only six out of 15 have given their statements,” said the DCP.

Police have learnt that dating applications such as Tinder, Bumble, Happn, TrulyMadly, QuackQuack and OkCupid were not the only hunting grounds of the racket; even matrimonial websites like Shaadi.com and Jeevansathi were fair game.

As for the café, where the alleged extortion was carried out, it used to be a hookah parlour that the police had shut down in the past. Two months ago, Didole and Amduskar, with the help of Shoaib, had got the place on rent.

Police are now probing several angles: The amount of money the accused had made through the racket, number of people duped so far, the number of fake cafés set up to carry out the extortion, and so on.

Investigation has revealed that in the past, two cases were registered against Shoaib in Mumbai and Bengaluru for his involvement in similar rackets. “This is not just a scam. It is a system built on psychology, timing, and trust. A system where loneliness was the entry point… and manipulation was the weapon,” Pankaj said.