The 19-year-old Gujarat resident arrested in a sextortion case earlier this week has allegedly confessed to having targeted 400 women over the last one month. As if this weren’t shocking enough, the accused has also told the police that he started on his crime spree after he fell prey to a similar crime earlier this year.
The accused, identified as Aditya Ravindra, 19, was arrested by the Antop Hill police from Gandhidam in Gujarat, after as many as 22 women registered a complaint against him.
The accused was allegedly morphing pictures of the victims, taken from their social media accounts, into pornographic content and sending them these clips. He was then demanding money from them via e-wallet services, threatening to release the clips on social media if they did not comply.
Over the last three days, the police have been trying to get a sense of Ravindra’s criminal activities and have made several disturbing discoveries. “By his own admission, Ravindra has made morphed clips of nearly 400 women and sent those clips to the women, with a demand for money. He would trawl the internet looking for open profiles, take the pictures of the victims from their own pages and create the clips.
Going purely by what the accused has told us so far, we suspect that the scope of his crimes extends to several cities in India,” said senior police inspector Nasir Kulkarni, Antop Hill police station.
The police have already started reaching out to other police stations in Mumbai to find out if they have received similar complaints from women in their area, and have also started getting results.
“We have identified police stations like Versova, Malad and Goregaon where similar cases have been registered and the accused is suspected to have been behind them. However, going by the number of victims, there might be cases in many more police stations, both in and out of Mumbai,” Kulkarni said
Ravindra has further claimed that he fell prey to a similar crime earlier this year, and decided to use the same modus operandi to earn quick and easy money.
Hence, after due research and preparations, he allegedly started his crime spree on June 25 this year. “This claim needs to be verified further as he had also made a lot of other claims during his interrogation, including that he reacted adversely to a recent break up with his ex-girlfriend. We are scanning his social media account history and bank account details,” said an officer who is part of the investigating team.
