Actor files complaint over harassment, defamation, extortion threats from unknown emails

According to South Cyber police officials, Khandelwal has been an actor since 2021 and is currently shooting for a leading production house in Mumbai. Owing to the demand of his profession, Khandelwal has to stay active on social media, police said. He has been on Instagram since 2020, through which he is in constant touch with his friends and relatives.

As per the complaint, he claimed that on April 13, 2022, an unknown person created an account in his name on Instagram (@agastayakk) and sent obscene messages to his friends and relatives. He had reported the matter to Instagram following which the fake account was blocked.

Khandelwal further informed the police that he received another email on March 9, 2023 from an ID identified as mulchandanitara@gmail.com, which read that he will be the next Sushant Singh Rajput as he will also end his life by suicide because of his unsuccessful career. The email was marked to his friends and relatives too.

“Following that episode, I got many such similar emails from an unknown account. So I lodged a complaint on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal,” read the actor’s statement. However as the harassment via fake email accounts did not stop, the actor wrote a reply to one of the emails and inquired about the concerns. The unknown sender then asked him to “go and meet the boss in Italy”.

Threatening that he should be ready for harassment for the next seven years, the unknown sender through an email said that it was the sender of that email who had been harassing the actor for the last three years. In a subsequent email, the sender threatened him to pay Rs 3 lakh or the defamation will continue.

“I feel someone is deliberately threatening me and sending such emails to my friends and relatives to defame me,” the complainant said in his statement to police.

In order to scare him further, the police said that the accused sent him another email in October 2023 and indicated they were keeping a close eye on his movements by sharing his current location.

But the actor decided to lodge a formal complaint after he received an email at 10.26am on December 1 in which the sender had defamed him again as well as his woman friend.

“The email was marked to 100 more people including their friends, relatives and the female friend’s parents. As I am convinced that by sending such emails, I am being defamed in the society so I have come to the police station to lodge a complaint,” he told the police.

The south cyber police then registered a case under sections 505 (statements conducing to public mischief), 500 (defamation), 383 (extortion), 465 (forgery), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged) of the Indian Penal Code along with sections 66 (c) and 67 of the IT Act.

When senior police inspector Devraj Borse of south cyber police station was contacted, he refused to divulge any detail of the case.