Mumbai: A 45-year-old Andheri-based garment trader fell prey to a sextortion racket and ended up losing a total of ₹12.78 lakh after blackmailers threatened him with a morphed video. The complainant on May 6 received a friend request on Facebook from a woman, Sona Agrawal. He accepted the request and the two began chatting over Facebook messenger.
Soon after they exchanged their WhatsApp numbers, the complainant got a video call from the woman. After ignoring it a few times, he eventually received her call.
During the video call, the woman was naked and urged the complainant to also take off his clothes. The complainant disconnected the call on seeing the woman.
A few minutes later the woman sent a morphed video to the complainant and threatened to upload it online if he failed to transfer a certain amount to her partner, the police said.
Four days later, the complainant received a call from the woman’s associate, Rahul Mishra, demanding money and threatening to upload his morphed video on YouTube, if he failed to meet his demand. By June 1, the complainant transferred nearly ₹2 lakh to various bank accounts as demanded by Mishra.
According to the police, on June 2 he received a call from one Gaurav Malhotra, who identified himself as an officer from the Delhi police’s Cyber cell and informed the complainant that he had seen his video on YouTube and managed to trace the woman who talked to him over the video call. But, she was found dead by suicide when police went to arrest her.
Malhotra claimed that the complainant’s name had cropped up in her suicide case and offered to drop his name from the case in lieu of money, the officer said. Scared, the complainant then transferred more money, as directed by Malhotra. But the “police officer” kept on asking for more money which made the complainant suspect that it could be a fraud.
After losing around ₹12.78 lakh to the fraudsters, the trader on Wednesday approached the Cyber police station and lodged a complaint based on which the police has registered a case.
Investigations have found that the fraudsters made the man transfer money to HDFC bank accounts of various individuals in cities like Fatehgarh, Agra, Mainpuri, Bulandshahar, Gurgaon, Bhiwani, Shajapur, Bhopal and Kalyan. The police has now written to the private bank seeking details of the account holders.