Mumbai: 3 arrested for ‘links to sextortion cases’

In the past year, there has been a rise in the number of cases of sextortion across the country and in Mumbai. An officer said that keeping in mind the rising sextortion cases in the city, a special squad was prepared to probe two such incidents. Based on their investigation, they arrested three main persons allegedly involved in the racket from Haryana and Rajasthan.

The police have found that the accused would scout for victims on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Telegram. They would target influential persons or those with a large number of friends and followers. The accused would create an account in the name of a woman and send them a friend request.

Over time, the accused would ask the victim to come on video call and record it secretly. “In some cases, they would ask the victim to remove their clothes or perform sexual acts. In others, they would just use the face of the victim and morph it to show that they were in a compromising position. Using this they would then extort money from the victim, threatening to upload these videos on their social media platforms,” the officer said.

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The officer said the racket was especially thriving in states like West Bengal, Haryana, UP and Rajasthan. He said that there are certain villages at the borders of Rajasthan, UP and Haryana from where several of the fraudsters operate.

“In some places youngsters were being trained on techniques to sextort someone,” the officer added.