A woman in her 30s from Kakkanad recently got a WhatsApp video call from an unknown number. She attended the call only to be shocked by the nudity on the other side. The next moment she got a video clip of that chat with her face captured along with the obscenity with an extortion bid, to stop the video from being sent to her friends on social media. To prove the point, a screenshot of the image shared with one of her friends was also sent to her.
Panic-stricken, she approached a police officer who advised her not to pay the money and to report it to the cyber cell. The practice of trapping unsuspecting victims in such sleaze videos to extort money has become so widespread and indiscriminate that even a police officer received such a video call. Being aware of the danger, he masked the camera before attending the call.
“Most victims choose to remain mum the first time fearing humiliation and seek help only when threatened repeatedly though even then they insist on not lodging a complaint. The modus operandi is rather simple as the caller trains the camera on some nude video on a computer screen when the call gets connected and uses the interim before a shocked victim regains composure and reacts to capture the video or image, which is then used for extortion,” said cyber police sources.
Nandakishore Harikumar, who runs a cybersecurity start-up and is actively associated with the Kerala Cyberdome, said that even lodging a formal complaint would be of little help as the perpetrator would be in some other State where the police would be hardly interested in pursuing the case even if the Kerala police were to diligently follow it up.
He said there were many variants of the same fraud like the perpetrators forging social media accounts and inviting women in the friends’ list of the original account holder to video-call them.
“There is no solution other than not attending video calls from unknown numbers. Falling for extortion bids would be a folly as there would be no end to it. For instance, a law professional paid ₹1.50 lakh in several lots under duress. It all boils down to data privacy and framing a law to ensure it. Since people leave digital footprints everywhere, it is easy for unscrupulous elements to access data and exploit it,” said Mr. Harikumar.
