33-yr-old made fake social media accounts of girls to extort men

New Delhi: Akash Choudhary, a 33-year-old commerce graduate from Sector-55 of Gurugram, downloaded thousands of photos of different girls from various social media applications and created more than nine fake profiles of women to lure men into befriending him and then extort them.

His plan, however, came undone, after he was arrested from Gurugram.

South East Delhi Police claimed that one such fake account has more than a million followers and was being used to post advertisements of other brands for promotion.

Choudhary even threatened the girls, whose photos he had stolen online.

In 2017, one of those woman filed a complaint alleging that someone had created several fake Instagram accounts using her photographs, which had been downloaded illegally from her genuine Instagram account.

When the victim contacted the accused, he threatened her to upload more pictures, defaming her by posting her pictures on escort services and prostitution sites. A case was lodged in this regard.

After detailed technical surveillance, the police team zeroed in on Choudhary, who was found to be running a meat shop in Gurugram.

On Friday, Deputy Commissioner of Police (South East) Chinmoy Biswal said that two years ago, the accused came up with the plan to create fake profiles of young and beautiful women on social networking sites and increase their followers by sending and accepting requests from men.

For this, he downloaded over thousand photos of different women. "He downloaded the pictures from social networking sites Instagram and Facebook and started following young women on these sites. He used to download pictures of these women from the sites and once he had a decent collection of 50-60 pictures, he used to create a similar separate fake profile of the genuine lady," said the DCP.

Biswal further claimed that Choudhary used to send alluring texts to men on Instagram posing as women.

On the pretext of friendship and meeting them, he would ask for money to be transferred to his e-wallet account. Around 10-12 men were duped this way.

"After raising the number of followers, the accused used to contact genuine companies and brands for promotion of their product on the fake profile," said the DCP.