Bhubaneswar Telecom Engineer Loses Rs 25 Lakh In ‘Sextortion’ On WhatsApp

Bhubaneswar: Friendship over social media has cost an engineer in Bhubaneswar his life’s savings, the second incident in the last few days after an IT professional was duped of Rs 24 lakh by cyber fraud.

The victim, an engineer with a leading telecom company, lodged a complaint on July 21 about having lost Rs 25 lakh to ‘sextortion’ or blackmailing after befriending a woman on Whats App, Bhubaneswar DCP Prateek Singh informed.

The DCP said the victim fell into a nude video calling trap after which the fraudsters started blackmailing him. Fearing humiliation, he transferred Rs 25 lakh in three instalments to an account that was shared by the caller, he added.

When the accused demanded more money, the engineer decided to approach the police.

According to police sources, the 50-year-old engineer had received a message from an anonymous WhatsApp number with a display picture of a woman. They soon started chatting and engaged in intimate conversations after a few days. The accused recorded a WhatsApp video call where they posed naked. The following day, the engineer received a call from a man, who introduced himself as a CBI officer from Delhi and informed him about a rape case having been registered against him based on the complaint of the woman with whom he had the intimate video chat. The accused then made an offer to drop the charges against him if he paid Rs 25 lakh.

Though the engineer initially ignored the call, the accused kept calling and threatened to make the video viral on social media and also raid his house. Following this, he started paying the money.

Police further said that 10 such cases have been registered by the police here in the past two years.  The tricksters use photos of women as their profile pictures to lure people and make them pose naked during naked, which are then used for blackmailing the victim.