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‘I got threat calls from Pakistan’: Gangsters told Vivek Oberoi ‘khatam kar denge’, hired security to protect family

Vivek Oberoi shared that he received threatening calls from Pakistan while he was in the US shooting for the 2009 film Kurbaan.

3 min readNew DelhiNov 20, 2025 02:30 PM IST

Vivek Oberoi talks about relationships and love. (Photo: Vivek Oberoi/Instagram)

In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the Hindi film industry was nothing less than wild west as underworld gangsters ran the show from behind the scenes and filmmakers, producers, actors regularly received extortion calls from them. To establish their dominance, the gangsters actually shot a few filmmakers, like Gulshan Kumar and Rakesh Roshan. And while many thought that after this, the intervention by the authorities cleaned up the system, that wasn’t the case. In a recent interview, actor Vivek Oberoi shared that he actually received threats from a gangster based out of Pakistan while he was shooting for his 2009 film Kurbaan in the US.

Vivek shared with Pinkvilla, “I was shooting for Kurbaan in the US and they left a threat on the (answering machine) system and as per law, I had to report it to the authorities there.” Vivek said that they called his hotel room and left a message, which was recorded in the hotel’s answering machine system.

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The message carried some keywords which were flagged, and after Vivek raised this with the hotel, they involved the police. “Local production people told me that you must inform so I did that,” he said and added, “While all of this was happening, I had to hire a lawyer in the US to deal with all this.”

Vivek shared that he was called in by the cops who questioned him. “I told them, ‘I don’t know anything’. I just landed up in this where they were saying, ‘We know you are here, khatam kar denge, uda denge (we will kill you).’ They were saying such things. And they traced that number back to Pakistan. And they said it’s a real number which has been flagged, that’s when I got scared,” he said.

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Vivek shared that until this point, he wasn’t really worried for his safety as he thought that this could be an elaborate prank. “Because initially, I wasn’t taking it seriously and I thought someone is just messing with me, that someone might just be pulling a prank on me, or just making drunk calls,” he said and added that he had to hire additional security as his family was under threat. “When I came back here, I had to take police security, that’s when the fear became real because then the threats started coming to the family, that started scaring you,” he said.

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Vivek has been living with his wife and children in the UAE for the past few years.

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