A sextortion gang duped a 71-year-old doctor from Delhi after a midnight video call that he assumed to be from a patient turned out to be a woman in a compromising position.
After the interaction over the video call, which was recorded all throughout, the doctor was inflicted with the position of being blackmailed, after which he ended up transferring Rs 8.6 lakh to the sextortion gang.
Although unable to deal with the pressure anymore, the doctor registered a case with the Delhi Police. Following this, two brothers from Rajasthan were arrested. The doctor informed the police that despite transferring Rs 8.6 lakh to the gang, the calls and demands didn’t cease.
The accused used to run a sextortion racket and have been blackmailed around 25 other people using the same playbook, as per an NDTV report.
The doctor had reached out to the Cyber Police Station and complained about the repeated video calls and blackmail that he used to receive from a gang. As per the complaint, the gang was so menacing that they would leak a video of his call with the woman on social media.
The police filed a case under sections related to cheating, criminal intimidation, and extortion, among others, and began their probe.
Apoorva Gupta, who is Deputy Commissioner of Police (East District), quoted to NDTV that they started tracing and surveilling the numbers from which the calls were made to the doctor. They finally managed to get a lead and the identity of a person from Rajasthan. Informers helped them verify this information and told them that the person was part of an extortion racket. They raided his house last week and arrested him and his brother.
Further, DCP Apoorva said that seven phones were recovered from their possession, including a device that was used to make the original video call as well as the phone and SIM card that were used to make the extortion call.
The accused has been identified as Abdul Rehman (39) who lived with his wife and three children, and his brother Aamir Khan (26). The accused duo is a resident of the Mewat area in Deeg district of Rajasthan. They have been remanded in police custody for five days.
The police, while conducting the probe, established a money trail. Police also discovered that the funds had been transferred to various bank accounts, bypassing KYC verification, in Haryana, Punjab, and Maharashtra.
The Deputy Commissioner also informed that a study of the bank accounts has led them to suspect that the gang had 25 more victims. However, the police have found that the other partners are possibly from the same village as the accused duo.
Among those 25 victims, four are from Delhi, while the others are from Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, and Rajasthan.
(Input from various sources)
(Rehash/Komal Bhoi/MSM)