The voice at the end of the landline is urbane and hesitant at first. The man, let’s call him Bombay Boy, was enlisted with one of India’s leading matrimonial websites when he was targeted by a sextortionist.
“I received what’s called an ‘interest’ message on my profile. I clicked to see who had reached out – she was beautiful! I scanned the rest of her profile, it looked genuine. One of the perks of being a premium member on this website was it allowed me to see the phone number of the woman so I sent her a WhatsApp message. Just a ‘hello, thank you for your interest’ kind of thing, with no idea where that would lead.”
Bombay Boy is warming up to his story. He has accidentally blurted his real name, mentioned the fact that he is a divorce’ and father of one, and also the line of work he is in. The revelations are partly to establish that he is a well-to-do upstanding member of society, and partly because he is a chatty kinda guy.
The perfect prey.
What followed after he received the “interest” message is now garden-variety sordid. The woman and he exchanged a few text messages on WhatsApp before his interlocutor asked for a video call. “I was surprised, but she insisted saying it would be like a face-to-face meeting, all the better to know me… My thought at this point was that she was rather bold. None of the women I had spoken to via the matrimonial website had been so quick to make a move. I, too, like to go ahead after a little chatting, checking out compatibility and most importantly, matching the horoscopes. But here she was, already video-calling me. I accepted the call and saw a woman in the nude, touching herself, but I could not see her face. I was stumped. ‘Aapko achcha nahi lag raha,’ she said. I disconnected, but she called back immediately. This time it was a different woman, similarly unclothed. ‘Who is this, what are you doing,’ I shouted and hung up.” Before long, he received two WhatsApp messages. The first was a screenshot of the video call, and the second message was a morphed video clip of the woman and someone with Bombay Boy’s face superimposed, pleasuring himself. “Ab kaisa lag raha hai? Yeh poora video viral kar doongi, sabko pataa lag jayega,” read the accompanying text in Roman script.
“From the time I received the expression of interest on the matrimonial website to getting that morphed video it was just half an hour,” he says. The next morning as he drove to work, he received a call from a man who identified himself as senior inspector Vikram Rathod from Delhi Police. There was an FIR against him for trapping gullible women, videotaping them and making those videos viral, said the inspector. “I parked the car to one side of the road for my blood drained and I was numb.” None of his protestations of innocence worked. The “cop” who was stern and authoritative told him that they had tracked his location and if he did not cooperate the local police would reach him shortly for further investigation. “As soon as I disconnected, I checked the number on TrueCaller, it did identify him as ‘Senior PI Vikram Rathod’.”
A network behind the racket
In Pune, that same week, another police inspector, a real one unlike “Senior PI Vikram Rathod”, was investigating the suicide of a 19-year-old student who had jumped off the 10th floor apartment he shared with his brother. There had been no obvious signs of depression, no suicide note left behind. Police inspector Vijay Khomane seized the young man’s phone and the tragic details came tumbling out. A woman called Prita Yadav had entrapped the BCom student on Instagram. A few horny messages, a morphed video, and that inevitable demand to pay up. He sent ₹4,500 in two tranches after which he ran out of money to give. The extortionist kept pushing him until he jumped to his death.
Bombay Boy and thousands of other men – for that’s the estimation – never even reach the police station or file an FIR, leaving the police no option but to let such crimes go undetected. But here, the college student’s brother filed an FIR for abetment to suicide and extortion. Four days prior to this suicide, a similar suicide of a 23-year-old man arising from sextortion had been reported in Sahakarnagar, the police station neighbouring PI Khomane’s Dattawadi police station. The Pune cops had two FIRs to work with now.
Their forensic investigation took them 1,400km north, to Mewat, a region that lies at the heart of India’s golden triangle, Delhi-Agra-Jaipur. Once an illustrious Rajput kingdom, modern-day Mewat comprises Alwar, Bharatpur, Laxmangarh, Deegh in Rajasthan, Nuh, Firozpur in Haryana, and parts of Mathura district in Uttar Pradesh. And despite the sweet sound of the exponents of the Mewati gharana of Hindustani classical music, the dialect spoken here is on the rough side. Rougher still is the politics of the Meo Muslims and the Meo Rajputs, the two dominant communities. The region that depends mostly on agriculture is one of India’s most underdeveloped with many of the men in the villages reportedly working as truck drivers.
The Pune Police team, tracking a live social media feed, found itself in the nondescript village of Gothri Guru in Laxmangarh. This was in late November last year. It’s one of the many villages of Mewat which has emerged as the centre of India’s sextortion racket. Like Jamtara in Jharkhand, infamous for phishing, Mewat is where bands of extortionists, most of them school drop-outs, are trapping men across the country using just a cell phone, a few pornographic videos, and deepfake tech – apps that use machine learning to superimpose faces on fake videos in minutes, instead of the dozens of hours it would take otherwise.
The local police busted 206 such cyber fraud gangs and arrested 205 suspects between 2021 and 2022 alone. Their pickings from sextortion had been in the range of ₹150 crore, says Alwar’s superintendent of police Tejashwini Gautam. “There are about two dozen villages in Alwar itself where half the population is directly or indirectly involved in cyber frauds. Two to four persons from every household in these villages are into this racket.” The neighbouring districts of Nuh and Bharatpur, she claims, harbour an even higher number of cyber criminals. The bespectacled and formidable-looking Gautam is undergoing a nine-month specialised training in tackling cyber offences and digital forensics. The urgent need to equip herself with these skills comes from the exponential scaling up of the sextortion racket. “In December 2021, based on a complaint from a resident of Texas, we arrested an Alwar resident who had used a single phone to cheat 6,000 people, including 1,200 from Telangana alone,” says Gautam. In January this year, the station house officer (SHO) of Govindgarh police station caught three men as they were withdrawing cash from an ATM. “They eventually confessed to having made over ₹11 crore from sextortion in the last two years,” says SHO Tarachand Sharma.
Such confessions are rare though. There is a strong sense of camaraderie among the scamsters, says SP Gautam. “They don’t betray each other, and rarely do we receive tip-offs and those too only after working hard on the village elders. The scammers know that if one of them goes down, it is a threat to everyone else.”
On the ground: How the extortion racket is run
For the sextortion business to flourish, it does take a village it seems: Person A supplies the SIM cards, Person B provides the fake bank accounts into which the money is collected, Person C engages in the sex chats, Person D plays the cop and extorts, while Person E withdraws the money from the ATMs. “Everyone gets a cut, but the person withdrawing the actual cash gets a disproportionately large 20% share because he is most at the risk of identification,” says a villager at Gothri Guru unwilling to reveal his name. “Very often the person collecting the cash will have no idea of who the original mastermind is,” he says. This makes it difficult for the police to detect an entire chain of the crime.
The police’s problems start with verifying the SIM cards which are obtained by providing fake identity documents, and are often bought from as far as Assam, West Bengal and Odisha. Most of these SIMs are procured by Mewat’s vast truck-driving community, reveals SP Tejashwini Gautam. The SIMs, each of which costs about ₹3,000, are discarded within a couple of days of the operation. “Last year, we collected the tower dumps of phone numbers in use in the region and got 25,000 SIM cards blocked. They were all registered in far-off states but were being used for committing cybercrimes here.”
But, that’s not where the problems end. The scammers operate multiple bank accounts opened using fake identities. Well-organised gangs operate from five villages of Bharatpur district. Mumbai Police, which bust an 18-member interstate jobs racket in November last year, found at least four of the accused were bank employees. The villages where fake bank accounts are created almost at cottage industry scale are: Bheradi, Ghaghor, Bhimalka, Gaawadi, and Gambadi.
There gangs focus only on opening accounts using bogus documents which they then sell to the cyber criminals, says Mumbai’s DCP (cyber) Balsing Rajput. They sell passbooks, chequebooks, pre-activated pin numbers, activated net-banking credentials, and even an activated SIM card, the number of which may be linked to the account as part of the deal. The organised nature of the racket is apparent from the fact that the gangs have a proper rate chart for the bank accounts, depending on the daily transaction limit of the concerned bank. An HDFC bank account sells for ₹40,000 as its daily transaction limit is ₹4 lakh, an Axis Bank account, opened using bogus documents, is sold for ₹10,000 as the bank’s daily transaction limit is only ₹40,000. A similar account at Yes Bank which has a daily transaction limit of ₹2.5 lakh goes for ₹25,000, while a Federal Bank account is sold for ₹20,00 as its daily transaction limit is ₹1 lakh.
Alwar SP Tejashwini Gautam says, in her own investigations, she found serving and retired bank employees to be in cahoots with the extortionists. Direct benefit accounts are also often used for receiving money. These are no-frills accounts and require little KYC protocol. “These accounts are discarded after 10-12 transactions,” she explains. Once sold to cybercriminal gangs, the accounts are also shared between gangs. “There have been instances where the leader of a sextortion gang calls up a part time jobs racketeer urgently asking him for ten bank accounts, which are then provided,” says a cyber-crime investigator with Mumbai police.
When the Pune police began their forensic investigation into the suicide of the 19-year-old, they found he had transferred the money into accounts in branches in Punjab and Haryana while the mobile from which the calls were made to extort money was registered in the name of a certain Dipu Bindani in Odisha and the Instagram account used to lure him was operating from Mewat.
The morphed videos, the kind Bombay Boy was targeted with, are produced using certain AI-based apps. “The version of deep nudes (called so as they are created using deep fake) we see today is a very sophisticated one where the target can be shown engaged in specific acts,” says an officer with the cyber police in Mumbai. Last July, Mumbai’s Antop Hill police arrested a 19-year-old from Gujarat, Aditya Ravindra, who blackmailed women by picking their photos off their social media feed and morphed them using deep fake.
“These deep nudes are being used by jilted lovers, for corporate espionage or sextortion. Most targets prefer not to register a complaint choosing to suffer in silence.” he adds. “Ninety per cent of the men who come rushing to us whenever they fall prey to sextortion go away without filing an FIR,” says the Mumbai cyber cell DCP Balsing Rajput.
What has the law enforcers especially worried is that these men are now distilling the crime to minimum effort. “The latest version of sextortion that we are hearing of does not even rely on video calls,” says Riteish Bhatia, a private cybercrime investigator in Mumbai. The extortionists check out profiles of men on social media, identify their female relatives from their friends lists, pick out the pictures of these women, and morph them over obscene pictures. These images are then used to blackmail the men into paying up,” says Bhatia who was the one to eventually help Bombay Boy deal with the sextortion.
Bhatia’s wife Nirali, who is a psychologist and works exclusively with victims of cybercrimes, says their trauma can be deep and long lasting. The three most common emotions that assail the victims are guilt, shame, and fear. Even if the conversation begins on a supposedly consensual note, the concept of sex is associated with taboo in India. When the first call comes from the sextortionist, the anxiety that blooms can over time turn into breakdown of trust and paranoia, she says.
“I had one case where the man called me up exactly one year after he was targeted, saying that the date itself was triggering suicidal feelings in him. I was on the phone with him for over three hours. Three of the other victims who approached me have not stepped out of their houses in months. Two of them at least had the option to work from home. The third went to work but had a panic attack and returned home. He locked himself in his room for two days and later quit his job.”
Protection and prosperity
When the Pune police team at Gothri Guru raided the house of their suspect, they found the 29-year-old Anwar Subhan Khan tutoring two other villagers on the intricacies of sextortion. The Class 4 drop-out who was found with five phones has allegedly trained many collaborators. ACP Sunil Pawar of Sinhagad Road Division in Pune told HT that Khan confessed to training others in cybercrime for a fee of ₹40,000 per student.
With ample cash to splash and rare blowbacks from law enforcers, the older generation of villagers greatly mitigate the seriousness of sextortion. When cops arrive from out-of-town to investigate, they are greeted with hostility, pelted with stones. In the Govindgarh case, where three men were arrested from an ATM, the police had to be accompanied by armed commandoes in specially shielded Boleros when they went to the village for recoveries. “The pushback is mostly from the womenfolk who refuse to believe a crime has been committed,” says the Alwar SP. In their minds, she adds, the women justify sextortion by calling the victims “ullus”, or fools. Many of the villages post a man on their outskirts to raise an alarm if they spy a police party approaching.
The denial over the criminality runs deep in village after village. “It is [only] a foolish man who hands over his money to someone more intelligent than him,” says Banne Khan, a village elder at Gothri Guru admiringly. The others who have joined him around a bonfire, nod in agreement. “If the caller falters, he lands in jail; whereas the person who has been called, only ends up losing some money.” If anything, there is regret over the Pune suicides due to the fact that the thriving sextortion business has now come under the police radar and the number of raids has gone up. “The greed for money has gotten to these fraudsters. They are trained in cheating, but don’t know when to call off the blackmail,” says Hiralal Verma, retired school principal and father of the local sarpanch, Babli Verma, striking a rare note of disagreement.
The Pune team that arrested Anwar Subhan Khan was allegedly threatened by his extended family and other villagers. Two teams of Laxmangarh police had to be called for back-up when the villagers began pelting stones. In the melee, constable Jagdish Khedkar was injured while Khan and the two other men who were with him fled towards the hills that surround Gothri Guru. One of these men’s escape was facilitated by a villager on a motorcycle, while another was too fleet-footed for the cops. Anwar Khan was arrested after a hot pursuit. He is at present out on bail.
Gothri Guru’s ex-sarpanch Tahir commiserates with the families of the deceased in Pune but contests police’s claims of crores being minted by villagers in the sextortion business. “Where are the villagers hiding these crores of rupees? It should have showed in the lifestyle here, but does it really?”
The only signs of upward mobility at Gothri Guru are in the sprawling under-construction houses in this village of 2,000 people. The plots are fenced by high boundary walls with impressive gates. Anwar Subhan Khan’s family too is building a farmhouse with several bedrooms and French windows. The family justifies the extravagant building by whipping out their GST number to prove the bona fides of their business. “We have 20 bighas of ancestral land and we have been in the marble-cutting business for generations,” says Anwar’s father Subhan Khan.
In this story that is all about furtive pleasures, guilt, anger, greed, there is yet another emotion at play at Gothri Guru – schadenfreude – the pleasure one feels at another’s misfortune. Even as the Khan family defends Anwar, saying, “The phone recovered from him isn’t even registered in his name,” a villager slyly points to an air-conditioned room at the top of the Khans’ home. “That is the office from he where makes those calls. No villager with a tiny stone-cutting business and crops from a few bighas of land can construct such a huge house,” he says, unwilling to be named. “What you don’t see are their houses and lands in Alwar town, their transport businesses flourishing away from gaze of people known to them,” says Hiralal Verma speaking about the wealth generated by sextortion gangs in Mewat.
Fending off such calls
In the meanwhile, Bombay Boy can’t get over his luck. A little over three weeks after his brush with the sextortionists, his 76-year-old father was targeted similarly. The video call, which his dad had answered, actually came on his mother’s phone. “She was livid. ‘What have you done,’ she shouted at my poor dad when the ‘policeman’s’ call eventually came, and she complained about him to me. As luck would have it, I knew exactly what to do in such situations.”
“The first rule of thumb if you’re the target of extortion is, never pay,” says DCP Balsing Rajput. “A cybercriminal sitting in one corner of Rajasthan has no reason to defame you by uploading your obscene videos or pictures on the internet. The only thing he gains from your fear is money. If you don’t pay, he loses his only motivation.” The sextortionist will not want to publish obscene video on social media as that can invite an FIR, or the police can take cognisance on their own after a verbal complaint. “Besides, these criminals are adept at identifying soft targets, especially those who are elderly. Once they realise that a particular person is not going to pay, they stop wasting their time and move on to the next victim.” Rajput encourages people to step forward and file FIRs if they have been targets of sextortion. “The more accurate the reporting of cases, the better we can map trends, identify locations where the rackets operate out of, and bust them.”
And if you ever wonder whether the beauty at the other end of that call is too good to be true: Boo!