E-Paper
Woman among four booked for blackmailing Ambala man, extorting ₹32,000
The victim, an Ambala-based man, received a nude video clip of himself and was asked to pay, with the accused blackmailing him with a false rape case and extorting money
Police are on the lookout for four people, including a woman, who extorted ₹32,780 from an Ambala resident after blackmailing him with his nude video.
The accused have been identified as Aarti Sharma, Rahul Sharma, Goswami, who pretended to be a Delhi Police official, and Sanjay Singh, a YouTuber, police said.
The complainant, who lives in Ambala City’s Sector 10, told the police that he received a friend request on a social media platform from a woman named Aarti Sharma earlier this week.
As she claimed to be an acquaintance, he accepted the friend request and also shared his WhatsApp phone number with her.
He said on the night of March 28, he consumed liquor and was about to sleep when he got a video call from Aarti. As he answered, he found her undressed and disconnected the call in two minutes.
Soon after, he received a nude video clip of himself and was asked to pay ₹20,000 within an hour, else the video will be released on the internet and he will be implicated in a false rape case.
To avoid trouble, he ended up paying a sum of ₹32,780 to Rahul Sharma through Paytm. But he started getting blackmail calls from Goswami and Sanjay Singh, following which he approached the police.
Superintendent of police Jashandeep Singh Randhawa said all four accused had been booked under Sections 384 (extortion) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 67 of the IT Act at Sector 9 police station. “Social media users should remain cautious while using such platforms and accepting invitations from strangers,” the SP said.
Station-incharge shifted
Meanwhile, SP Randhawa also said the Sector 9 station in-charge, inspector Suresh Kumar, had been shifted to police lines over “poor disposal of cases in the last few days”.
Recently, a group of men had allegedly attacked a couple of employees of the irrigation department and in another case, the statue of Shaheed Udham Singh was damaged, both under Kumar’s jurisdiction.
