Mumbai: Owners of two apps arrested, police hint at Singapore link to portal streaming adult movies

Shrivastava, police believe, is currently based in Singapore.

“While Fliz Movies was registered in India, but it seems Shrivastava realised that they could fall foul of Indian laws and decided to register it abroad and changed the name of the portal,” an officer said. It took the police a while to identify Shrivastava as the other accused only knew him as Yash Thakur and none had met him.

An officer said that the other accused, including Khan, Gehna Vasisth, and Tanveer Hashmi, had told the police that they would speak to Thakur on a +65 number – the country code for Singapore. The police got a hint about Shrivastava’s identity after they found some money transfers to his account from ‘Fliz Movies’.

“Subsequently, we sent a police team to Kanpur and traced his family members. They confirmed that Yash Thakur was actually Shrivastava, who is an IT engineer and had moved to Singapore in 2004,” an officer said. He is an accused in the case and we are making efforts to ensure that he faces the law.

The officer said that while Shrivastava is not directly linked to Kundra, both of them would upload content provided by Khan, who had her own app as well, Vasisth and Hashmi.

The police, meanwhile, claimed that they have received complaints about some other apps displaying pornographic content too. “Now that we do not have any accused in our custody, we will go through these complaints and decide on how far to widen the scope of our investigation,” a senior officer said.

So far, the police have made 11 arrests in the porn racket case, including Kundra and Ryan Thorpe, the IT head of the former’s company Viaan Industries on July 19. Nine others were arrested in February this year. The IPC sections invoked in the case provide maximum imprisonment of five years, and seven years if caught for the same offense for the second time.