A minor has been detained, while a 29-year-old man has been arrested from Rajasthan for allegedly sextorting money from a Matunga-based MBBS doctor.
Background details of case
The Free Press Journal had reported about the matter on June 19 after the victim registered a First Information Report (FIR) with the Matunga police station. According to the victim, 26, he had received a follow request on Instagram from an account of one Ayeshi Sharma which he accepted. They started chatting, subsequently exchanging their contact number. The woman asked if he was interested in a sex-video, and he agreed. As he accepted the WhatsApp video call, a girl was standing nude and demanded him to remove his clothes as well. He did, but the call was disconnected. Moments later, the victim received a video from an unknown number which was the clip of him nude.
The victim later got a call from a man who introduced himself as ACP Ram Pandey from the New Delhi police's Cyber Crime Cell. The supposed cop said that they are filing a chargesheet against a woman named Ayeshi Sharma, and during the investigation they found the victim's obscene video being surfaced on social media. They told him to contact Sanjay Singh, another police officer from New Delhi police's Social Media department to seek help. Singh kept demanding money on various pretext including deleting the video, etc, and the victim ended up paying Rs. 2.5 lakhs.
A hard case to crack
According to Police Inspector Keshav Wagh, this was a hard case to crack. The complainant/victim approached the police two to three days after the incident, and by that time the money he transferred had all fallen into different bank accounts. Secondly, the accused had used at least 18 different mobile numbers to contact and connect with the victim via phone calls, video calls, WhatsApp messages, Instagram, etc.
"Before we got into it, we blocked the victim's account and managed to freeze some transactions - which saved Rs. 80,000 out of the Rs. 2.5 lakhs that was lost. We started with looking into the numbers used for calls and the Instagram account by the name Ayeshi Sharma. We used its IP address to look into a larger location idea, so we know where to start. It was Rajasthan at first, then narrowed down to Deeg district. A team was deployed to Deeg, where our technical team were guiding them, and the local police were providing assistance," explained Wagh.
Accused nabbed
The location of the accused which the police managed to track kept on moving, and wherever they managed to reach, the accused was nowhere to be found. They found a minor boy, age 16, whose IP address location matched with the accused they were looking for. However, the primary accused was still missing. "We received the intel that the news of police entering the village put the villagers on high alert - they ended up hiding in the farms. Our team waited outside for several days, waiting for the accused to be off guard, and when he finally made an exit from his village, we nabbed him," said Wagh.
The two accused are identified as Sawir Hamida Khan, 29, and Tanjim Rafiq Ahmed, 16. Both of them have been charged with the offences of cheating, extortion of the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act.
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