Morphing and impersonations were the main methods to target victims
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Hyderabad: Insulting the modesty of women, sexual exploitation, and blackmailing are motives of a large section of cyber criminals in Telangana. Last year, the motives in 90 cases were to insult the modesty of women and in 24 cases, it was sexual exploitation, shows NCRB data. In as many as 35 cases, the accused were trying to blackmail women.
The Telangana police had arrested five “distinct sexual freaks” in different cases, according to the data. Majority of the victims in these cases were targeted on Facebook. Morphing and impersonations were the main methods used.
The cyber criminals who were arrested for targeting women believed that they could get away with the offences thinking that they were anonymous in the cyber world. Most of them were also using fake profiles on Facebook to attack their victims.
“They strongly believed that the victims or police could never identify them or catch them since they had anonymity in cyber space. A few of them were also intelligent enough to tap into WiFi facilities of others and browse. However, since we have cyber experts tracking them, they cannot remain anonymous for a long time,” said a senior cyber crime police official from Cyberabad.
While many offenders seek sexual gratification by targeting women Facebook users, a lion’s share of the offenders are also out there to defame their victims by creating fake profiles of their targets and flooding them with obscene content before sending friend requests to the victims’ relatives. Some also put up mobile phone numbers of victims on Facebook mentioning them as call girls.
Shockingly in many cases, the predators lurk in the neighbourhood or are from the same family. As per NCRB, as many as 25 offenders arrested by the Telangana police last year were friends, relatives and neighbours of the victims.
Senior police officials say that there is still a strong reluctance among women to approach the police. Many victims do not even discuss it with their kin even after being harassed online for many months. In the recent case of Abdul Majid, who extracted naked photos of around 80 teenaged girls, none of the victims came out till this week, police officials say. Cyber crime officials promise that they protect the identity of the victims completely, so the latter need not fear any trouble after lodging a complaint.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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