What began with a single click on an online instant loan advertisement turned into a year-long ordeal of fear and financial extortion for a 37-year-old bank Relationship Manager and his family. Investigators say the victim, identified as Akshay Omprakash, was forced to pay ₹17.6 lakh over the course of the scam, while the accused continued demanding a further ₹10.08 lakh. Mumbai Crime Branch has arrested six people in connection with the case and launched a wider investigation into a suspected network of unregistered loan applications.
From One Click to a Year of Extortion
According to the investigation, the victim, working with an international bank, clicked on an instant loan advertisement while browsing videos online in April 2025. Soon after, an Account Aggregator process was triggered on his phone and ₹23,150 was credited to his account without his explicit consent. Days later, he began receiving calls from alleged recovery agents demanding immediate repayment with interest, and fearing consequences, he made the initial payment.
The harassment only escalated from there. Investigators allege he was repeatedly instructed to download new loan applications and use payment links supplied by the fraudsters, and at one stage was asked to install an APK file that allegedly gave the accused unauthorised access to his phone and the personal data stored on it, including his contact list, photographs and messages.
Police say the accused then called his relatives, colleagues and acquaintances to defame him and pile on pressure, while fake recovery agents visited his residence, humiliated him publicly in front of neighbours, sent morphed images of his wife, and threatened to kidnap his children unless further payments were made. The victim further alleged that in December 2025, a group of men arrived at his home and assaulted him in front of his wife and children, and that he was separately attacked outside his workplace. The sustained threats forced the family to largely confine themselves indoors, and even sending their son to stay with relatives for safety did not stop the fraudsters from continuing to threaten abduction.
A Slow Start, Then a Coordinated Takedown
The victim said he initially approached both the cyber police and a local police station, but no FIR was immediately registered. The case gathered momentum only after senior authorities became aware of the matter, following which Mumbai Crime Branch’s Unit 2 took over. In a planned operation in May 2026, police arrested Sudesh Waghmare, Parvesh Gorivle, Pravin Jadhav, Pravin Thorat, Ravi Jaiswal and Valmiki Gupta, booking all six under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita covering extortion and criminal intimidation.
This pattern is far from confined to Mumbai. Nagpur Cyber Police recently dismantled a similar interstate racket built around a fake instant loan app called Mast Money, which falsely projected itself as RBI-approved to gain victims’ trust before morphing their photographs into obscene images and threatening to circulate them unless additional payments were made, a probe that traced back to an accused operating out of Madhya Pradesh. Preliminary findings in the Mumbai case similarly indicate that several of the loan applications used were not registered with the Reserve Bank of India, and police have issued notices to operators of multiple suspected apps as they examine the involvement of others linked to the network.
Prof. Triveni Singh, the former IPS officer and cybercrime specialist, said fake loan app syndicates have evolved well beyond illegal lending and are increasingly exploiting victims’ personal data for blackmail and digital extortion. He warned that downloading APK files from unknown sources or granting excessive permissions to unverified apps can expose users to serious cyber risk, and advised removing any application that seeks unnecessary access to contacts or photos immediately. He urged victims of such harassment to report incidents without delay through the 1930 National Cyber Crime Helpline and the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, rather than waiting, as this case shows can happen, for the situation to escalate before authorities act.
