Alwar police on Wednesday arrested eight members of a ‘sextortion’ gang that targeted people including a Bharatiya-origin man settled in USA. The accused had extorted nearly Rs 15 crore from different people by blackmailing them using pornography clips.
As per a Times of India report –
“Alwar SP Tejswani Gautam said police had learned that a few suspects were blackmailing people through porn clips and a special team was set up to probe into the matter.
A police constable ran a decoy operation and soon came into contact with one of the accused masquerading as a woman. The accused demanded Rs 10,000 from the constable, following which a person was stationed near Roopbas flyover in Alwar.
Police seized his mobile phone and found that messages and the video calls sent to the constable were from the same SIM. Later, police arrested all accused identified as Gafruddin alias Shoeb (28), Saif Ali alias Saifu (26), Akram Khan (33), Sajid alias Dhola (20), Ashfaq (21), Rashid (21), Moen Khan (20) and Moen (20).
Except for Moen, a resident of the Shastri Nagar of Jaipur, the remaining are residents of Dausa district. Police said the accused relied on the same modus operandi where a gang member would masquerade as a beautiful woman on social media sites to befriend potential targets. Casual online flirting soon turned into bolder chatting till numbers were exchanged on WhatsApp.
The next bait is porn where the victim thinks the person in the clip is the ‘woman’ he is chatting with and invariably gets tricked into indulging in a sex act that is recorded. The accused then begins to blackmail the victim, demanding hefty money in multiple tranches.
This time, however, the gang also targeted a non-resident Indian (NRI), settled in Texas, US. “He informed us that a gang was trying to blackmail him. We told him not to send any money to the accused,” Gautam said. Alwar police said they were monitoring similar gangs who target people through pre-downloaded porn clips.”
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