Man accused of cheating Mumbai woman, 31, after hacking her phone arrested: Cops

The Mumbai woman, a 31-year-old animator, told the police that she put up with the blackmail for more than a year, giving in to his demands for money over and above the ₹30 lakh he transferred from her account, an officer at the central region cyber police station said.

MUMBAI: A 41-year-old man in Pune was arrested on the complaint of a Mumbai woman who alleged that the suspect hacked her phone, transferred ₹30 lakh from her bank account and accessed her private photos that he used to blackmail her, police said.

Police said the accused, a man from Pune’s Talegaon, mostly identified his potential victims from profiles uploaded on matrimonial websites. (Shutterstock)

The woman, a 31-year-old animator, told the police that she put up with the blackmail for more than a year, giving in to his demands for money over and above the ₹30 lakh he transferred from her account, an officer at the central region cyber police station said.

Like when earlier this year, Yuvraj Bhosale, the man arrested from Pune’s Talegaon, spotted her with a new sports utility vehicle on her social media photos and asked her to give him the vehicle. When she refused, he sent three associates who snatched the SUV from her. She didn’t complain to the police.

It is not clear what prompted her to approach the police. She reached out to the cyber police station recently about the blackmail but was initially wary of pressing charges. On Wednesday, she finally submitted a formal complaint.

Deputy commissioner of police (Cyber wing) Dr Rashmi Karandikar set up a team led by senior inspector Sanjay Govilkar to track down the accused. Govilkar’s team arrested Bhosale on Friday.

The woman wasn’t Bhosale’s first victim, and so far, they know of his three aliases; Satish, Raje Veer and Virendra Sinha. He already has eight criminal cases registered against him since 2013, the year Bhosale started targeting women, a senior police officer said.

In his initial interrogation, Bhosale told the police that he graduated with a degree in psychology graduate and had also studied a bit of criminology.

Police said he mostly selected his potential victims from profiles uploaded on matrimonial websites. “If he wanted to target a doctor, then he would pose as a doctor and after gaining the woman’s trust, blackmail her and extort money,” the senior officer said.

When he approached the 31-year-old animator from Mumbai’s Dadar via a matrimonial website, Bhosale posed as an animator

In her complaint to the police, the woman, a divorcee, said she was living with her parents and finally gave in to family pressure to get remarried in 2019 and put up her profile on matrimonial sites.

A few weeks later, the woman said in her complaint, she received WhatsApp messages from an unidentified person, and a bunch of photographs, the second police officer. These were her private photographs that she had put away in her phone’s password-protected folder.

“She says that someone hacked her mobile phone,” the officer said.

“She thought if the hacker could get access to her private files kept in a password-protected folder, then he may also get access to her banking details linked to her email and the mobile number. According to her complaint, she found someone had fraudulently transferred ₹30 lakh from her bank account after disabling the SMS alert service of her bank account, to prevent the bank’s message from reaching her,” the officer added, citing the First Information Report registered by the police. The man also called her up on phone, threatening to leak the photographs if she complained to the police.

Police said the woman did not spell out how much money she paid to Bhosale. “These aspects will be revealed during the investigation when officers analyse her bank statements as well,” another police officer said.

Two mobile phones have been seized from Bhosale and sent for forensic analysis. The SUV that his associates took away from the woman has also been recovered from him, the officer said.

Bhosale has been booked on charges of cheating by personation, cheating, criminal intimidation, provoking someone to breach peace, insulting the modesty of any woman, stalking, extortion, and several provisions of the Information Technology Act relating to illegally accessing a computer resource and dishonestly using someone’s password.

During its preliminary investigation after Bhosale’s arrest, the officer said, the cyber police has come across instances of the man cheating five other women including one who said she lost around ₹20 lakh. “I think some of them will come forward to file FIRs,” the officer said.