A 71-year old doctor from Delhi was duped off Rs 9 lakh by a sextortion gang after a midnight video call, that he assumed to be from a patient turned out to be a woman in a compromising position.
Following the interaction over the video call which was recorded all throughout, the doctor landed in a position of being blackmailed after which he ended up transferring nearly Rs 9 lakh to the gang.
However, unable to deal with the pressure anymore, the doctor registered a case with the Delhi Police, following which two brothers from Rajasthan were arrested. The doctor informed the police that he had transferred nearly Rs 8.6 lakh to the gang but despite that the calls and demands continued.
As per an NDTV report, the men used to run a sextortion racket and have been suspected to have blackmailed around 25 other people using the same playbook.
According to the police, the doctor had approached the Cyber Police Station and complained about the repeated video calls and blackmail that he used to receive from a gang. As per his complaint, the gang was threatening that they would leak a video of his call with the woman on social media.
The police registered a case under sections related to cheating, criminal intimidation and extortion, among others and began its investigation.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (East District) Apoorva Gupta, as quoted by NDTV said, “We started tracing and surveilling the numbers from which the calls were made to the doctor. We finally managed to get a lead and an identity of a person from Rajasthan. Informers helped us verify this information and told us that the person was part of an extortion racket. We raided his house last week and arrested him and his brother.”
DCP Gupta further 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 was used to make the extortion call.
The accused duo has been identified as Abdul Rehman (39) who lived with his wife and three children, and his brother Aamir Khan (26). Both are residents of Mewat area in Rajasthan’s Deeg district and have been remanded in police custody for five days.
The police while conducting the investigation established a money trail and 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. “We are gathering information on other associates of the two brothers” DCP Gupta added. The police have however found that the other associates are possibly from the same village as the accused brothers.
As per investigation, among the other victims, four are from Delhi, while the others are from Bihar, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
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