Cops arrest woman part of Arnala porn racket

A woman has been arrested in Mumbai for her involvement in a pornography racket, where audition clips of an aspiring actress were sold to porn sites.

MUMBAI: The Mira Bhayander – Vasai Virar police crime branch on Wednesday arrested a woman, the fourth accused, part of the pornography racket busted on Tuesday when the police arrested three men for allegedly shooting intimate scenes of an 18-year-old aspiring actress and selling the audition clips to porn sites.

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The woman identified herself as a make-up artist from Virar when the actress was called for the audition.

The gang received ₹50,000 to 60,000 by selling the audition clips to porn sites, said the crime branch officers adding that the site had been shut down by them.

On November 1, the 18-year-old was called to Virar for an audition for a web series that would be released on OTT platforms. The duo had introduced themselves as cameraman and director of the web series.

When she went to a farmhouse at Arnala beach for the audition, three men, including Jaiswal and Vishwakarma, and a woman were present, who said they were a part of a production crew. In the first sitting, she was asked to read out some lines from a script. After a few days, she was asked to come again for a second round, where she was asked to bring a partner to enact intimate scenes that would be viewed before selecting her as a lead in the web series.

The police said that during the alleged audition, the couple was asked to perform intimate scenes, and later she found out that audition clips had been uploaded on several porn websites. On December 14, she approached the Arnala police to lodge a complaint against the three men and the woman after her partner noticed that their intimate videos, shot for the ‘audition’ were uploaded on some porn sites.

“The accused have told us that they had shot several such videos luring aspiring actresses and actors, and for each upload, they got ₹50,000 to ₹60,000 from porn sites. We are now tracking down the women who were cheated by the gang and forced to shoot intimate scenes for pornographic websites,” said a crime branch officer.

The accused are booked under sections 420 (cheating) and 501 (publishing defamatory matter) of the Indian Penal Code and sections 66E (violating privacy), 67 (publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form), and 67A (publishing or transmitting sexually explicit material in electronic form) of the Information Technology Act.