Mumbai techie arrested for cyberstalking woman for 8 years

According to police sources, the complainant installed an online dating app on her mobile phone in the first week of March.

The city crime branch on Thursday arrested a 25-year-old Malad resident, who worked at the office of a global web search engine in Bandra-Kurla Complex, for allegedly stalking a woman on the Internet, social networking sites and a dating application for eight years.

The city crime branch on Thursday arrested a 25-year-old Malad resident, who stalked a woman for eight years. (HT File (Representational Image))

According to police sources, the complainant installed an online dating app on her mobile phone in the first week of March. She got a friend request from Abhijeet Mukherji, who went with the username John. The two started chatting frequently, after which Mukherji insisted they meet.

During their meeting at Haji Ali, Mukherji told the woman he knew her from 2009, when she was in a college in the city. He also recounted incidents from her college days. Mukherji told the woman he had called up her college in Glasgow, Scotland, where she went for further studies, to get information on her.

“During his stint at a world-renowned auditing firm, Mukherji got bank details of the complainant and her family. He told her that using his technical expertise [as he worked at a search engine], he managed to delete the friend requests she got on the dating site,” said a police source.

“Mukherji told her he had been stalking her on the internet for eight years as he loved her. He asked her to delete the dating app from her phone, and threatened her saying he would not tolerate any other person in her life,” said the source.

The complainant then started to avoid him, but he kept calling her from different mobile numbers.

“Once he called her posing as a photographer and asked her to meet him for some work. But she refused,” said another source. “Later, the accused called her, posing as a journalist, to a mall in the city. On reaching the mall, she realised it was him. As she was leaving the mall, the accused allegedly threatened and insulted her,” he said.

As he kept trying to get in touch with her, the woman lodged the complaint. The complainant also told the police that in January 2016, when she was in Glasgow, she got a link from a Facebook account, Mannu Bhai Macho. The link had pornographic content, with a note asking her to call on a mobile number.

The woman’s friend, too, had received vulgar videos from the same ID giving the same number in January 2015, after which he had lodged a complaint with the cyber police.The police are checking if the accused had a role to play in this too.

Mukherji has been booked under sections 354 (criminal force to any woman to outrage modesty), 354D (stalking), 419 (cheating by personation), 506 (criminal intimidation) of Indian Penal Code and 66D (cheating by personation by using computer resource) of the Information Technology Act.

Mukherji’s mobile phones and SIM cards have been seized by the police and sent to the laboratory for examination.