Cyber Crime
Love Is In The Air & Sextortion On The Internet. So, Beware!
It’s the season of love and Valentine week too. The singles out there are looking for love. The millennials, particularly, find the internet to the best place for everything they do, even finding true love. There’s a word of caution, however.
Beware of the upcoming danger! Online scammers have adopted new ideas of extortion to exploit innocent people.
The cyber fraudsters make video calls to the ‘victims’ on Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp after getting their numbers during their chat.
They put a woman’s photo as a profile photo and chat with the victims and express their desire and passion to talk to them over video calls.
When people affirm, they usually get a call from a woman and on answering the call, a naked photo with a covered face appears. The video gets paused and one can only hear the voice.
Soon, the calls citing poor internet connectivity, tells the caller to call back.
“Now, the caller gets excited and calls her back without any clothes unaware of the fact that the video call was being recorded,” the cyber crime police said.
They are sent to the victims with demands for money for not uploading the video on internet or sharing it with their friends and relatives from his social media accounts.
In the beginning, they demand anywhere between ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 and once the victim starts paying, they extort more from them through online mode of transaction — GooglePay, PhonePe or Paytm, he said.
Every week there are more than half-a-dozen people, especially teenagers, youth and middle-aged men, who are approaching the police, complaining that they were honey-trapped into going naked over video calls and are being blackmailed.
Sometimes, the fraudsters make video calls randomly on different numbers or accounts on video call-enabled social media platforms and exploit them sexually.
The best way to remain safe is to avoid such friendships and such video calls. If you are getting into such relationships then stay cautious and alert.
Don’t let the other person cross the boundary without knowing their identity correctly.
