Mumbai: The Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch on Thursday nabbed a 28-year-old man for sextorting 39 people across the country. The suspect, Vikas Mandal, a Jharkhand resident, used a paid escort website.
The police said the man and his associates disguised themselves as members of the website and offered bogus deals with advance payment via UPI. After duping people, they became incommunicado. In some cases, they even approached random people and threatened them with making ‘edited’ videos viral.
As per the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP), over 326 complaints are registered with similar modus operandi, with 35 in Telangana alone, one in Delhi, 22 in Jharkhand and one in Pune.
The police said the suspects have been running the racket since 2018. “We have been chasing them since Oct 2020. On Thursday, the man was arrested after a tip-off that he was coming to Asalpha in Ghatkopar,” said a police official. A police team was deployed and the man matching the description was apprehended. During interrogation, the police tracked all the registered cases across the country. A recent one was lodged at MIDC Police Station in Bhosari, Pune. Mandal was handed over to them, the police said.
