Seven men and a woman were remanded in custody
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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The cyber police have busted an online sex racket in a simultaneous undercover operation carried out in five districts in the state.
Twelve people, including four women and a 14-year-old boy, were nabbed. Seven men and a woman were remanded in custody.
Three women who were produced before undercover agents as escorts were identified as victims. Since none came to take them back, they were shifted to the Nirbhaya Home in the capital.
The boy, the son of the only woman arrested, will be produced before the district Child Welfare Committee here. The sleuths cracked open the racket through Locanto, a free classifieds site that also provides ‘escort services,’ which the police said was a euphemism for call girl services.
It is said that there is a profusion of sites like Locanto on the web. It was a casual call to one of the hundreds of numbers advertised in the site for escort services that led the police to a handful of links in a big sex racket.
The man who picked up the call identified himself as Praveen. When the undercover agent identified himself as a businessman in need of women, Praveen said they would be met by the woman in Kollam.
The undercover team was then met by a family of three; the ‘husband,’ wife and their 14-year-old son. “This female, who was identified as Bini, was both an escort and an agent and she put us in touch with agents in Kochi,” the source said. It turned out that the man who came with Bini was not her husband.
Three women, who were brought by an agent named Ajeesh, had identified themselves as medical and nursing students. “On interrogation, it was found that they were not students and also that they had all been married and divorced. Some even had children,” the source said.
The police said that Ajeesh had been actively involved in sex racket for many years and further investigation would help uncover his activities. The Kochi city police have arrested nearly ten people in various cases for running sex rackets in the last couple of days.
( Source : deccan chronicle )
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