19-year-old man from Rajasthan arrested in sextortion case

A 19-year-old man from Rajasthan has been arrested by Navi Mumbai police for extorting over ₹43.23 lakh from a resident by recording his nude videos during a WhatsApp call. The accused, Haleem Fareed Khan, was arrested with the help of the Rajasthan police. The police faced resistance from villagers during the arrest due to the prevalence of cybercrime in the area. The victim was cheated over a period of five months after being befriended on Facebook and coerced into transferring money to various bank accounts. Investigations are ongoing to identify other individuals involved.

Navi Mumbai: The Navi Mumbai police arrested a 19-year-old man from Rajasthan for allegedly extorting more than ₹43.23 lakh from a Koparkhairane resident after recording his nude videos during a WhatsApp call sex.

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The accused identified as Haleem Fareed Khan, 19, a resident of Dig district in Rajasthan, was arrested in the early hours of December 24 by a team of Navi Mumbai and Rajasthan police. According to police officials, Dig district is a hub of cybercrime and the villagers are non-co-operative during investigations in such cases.

“There have been incidents of stone pelting on the police officers who come to nab people accused in cybercrime from this district. Hence we took help from the superintendent of the police who sent his team with us. We chose to enter the village from the fields after midnight. After we nabbed the accused, the whole village got to know and they were about to create a ruckus, but we managed to leave the village in time without anyone noticing us,” said police inspector Gajanan Kadam from cyber police station, Navi Mumbai.

From May to August this year, a 34-year-old man from Koparkhairane was cheated of ₹43.23 lakh through sextortion. The complainant, who was currently unemployed and was looking out for a job, was befriended by one ‘Khushi Malik’ through Facebook. The duo exchanged their WhatsApp numbers after a few days of chatting. ‘Malik’ made a video call to the complainant where she was nude and also asked the complainant to undress himself, which he did. After an hour of the call, he got a call from a person who introduced himself as ‘Sanjay Arora’ from Delhi police. Arora threatened the complainant to make his video call viral and that he would upload it on YouTube.

To avoid the same, Arora asked the complainant to transfer money to an account number. Over the next five months, the complainant transferred a sum of around ₹43.23 lakh to various bank account numbers as demanded by Arora. Fed up with the harassment, he had approached the police. “With the help of the technical evidence, we could trace Khan, who was the handler of the bank accounts where the money was being transferred. There are more people involved, but how many of them is yet to be known. Khan is a class VIII pass-out and is suspected to have been in this field for last two years at least. We froze the bank account and recovered ₹4.12 lakh,” Kadam added.

The accused was produced before a local court which remanded him in police custody till December 29 and further investigations are on.