Sextortion racket busted, 3 arrested

New Delhi: The Crime Branch of the Delhi police has busted a gang of cyber fraudsters involved in several cases of sextortion, the officials informed on Tuesday. The accused persons have been identified as Jarif (30), a resident of Rajasthan’s Bharatpur, Neeraj (22) and Ajit Singh (23), residents of Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura.

According to the Special CP Crime Ravindra Singh Yadav, the gang members recently extorted Rs 1.8 crore from a retired officer. “Information received in Crime Branch that a retired Commandant from ITBP had filed a complaint to South West District Police, in which he alleged that he came across a lady on Whatsapp, who threatened him to viral an obscene video on various social media. Subsequently, he received a phone call from a person, who posed himself as Inspector Ram Kumar Malhotra from Crime Branch, Delhi Police and extorted money on the pretext to block the obscene video on social media,” Yadav said.

Later he was told by the sextortionist gang that the girl, who had called the victim, had committed suicide in Rajasthan and further told the victim that the matter has now become complicated and a murder case will be registered against him.

Further, they extorted money pretending to be senior police officers and officials of MHA, at different intervals to close the murder case. In the sequence of incidents, the accused persons had extorted about Rs 1.8 crore. Even after that, they were demanding more money from the complainant. Thereafter, the victim filed a complaint in South-West District, Yadav confirmed.

During the investigation, the team of ISC collected information and analysed details of more than 200 mobile phones and obtained details of more than 20 bank accounts of various banks. After analysis of the bank accounts details.

Further, after technical analysis, it has established that they used to operate the gang from Mathura and Bharatpur from different mobile numbers. Later, the team conducted a raid at Mathura, UP and Bharatpur, Rajasthan, and apprehended three accused persons, Yadav mentioned.

They used to get contact details of the target through social media and later they make a video call to the victim. During the call, they used to play an obscene video and thereafter they used to call the victim asking for extortion money to delete the video which was recorded during the video call. In some cases victims paid lakhs of rupees, Special CP said. Further investigation is under process.