50-year-old falls for virtual lure; Indore woman gets a nasty surprise

BHOPAL: It was a perfectly normal day in office for this 32-year-old Indore woman when a 50-year-old man burst in, saying: “I have been looking for you for over a year. You can’t leave me. I’m madly in love with you...” The woman was furious and said she had never set eyes on him. “But we had an affair for four years,” insisted the equally bewildered father of two, who had come all the way from Punjab.
It sounds like a crazy script but both of them were saying the truth.They were victims of a cyber fraud, allegedly perpetrated by a Delhi woman who got a kick out of creating fake profiles, chatting up strangers and leaving them high and dry. The complaint was filed in December last year. TOI is withholding the names of the victims and the suspect because the investigation is still in a very early stage. Impersonation for gain is a crime in both IPC (Section 419) and IT Act (Section 66D), punishable by up to three years in prison,
According to documents available with TOI, police investigation revealed that the suspect admitted to being a “Facebook addict”, who enjoyed making fake profiles and “luring people in virtual affairs to disturb their lives”.
Around Christmas last year, the Indore woman got an unpleasant surprise when the man from Amritsar landed up at her office. He said he had looked for her in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Gujrat, Indore and Bhopal. “I even lost my business. You cannot do this to me,” he pleaded. She ticked him off and filed a police complaint on December 26 at the Cyber Cell, Bhopal. The 50-year-old told cops that he became friends with her on Facebook in 2011. “She even gave me her phone number and I used to call her. We were in touch for four years.” He was shattered when she blocked him in 2014 and deleted her profile. “When I called her, she said she would never meet me and I’d never be able to find her. Since them I have been looking for her,” he said.
Last year, he again found her profile and her Indore office address and made the long trip there. On checking the internet activity of the duo, police found that the fake Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Indore woman were made in Delhi.
When police confronted the Delhi woman, sources say, she admitted to making her Facebook profile in 2011. She posted political issues, which got her a lot of likes and virtual friends. “They often asked me about my whereabouts. But I wanted to hide my identity which is why I changed my Facebook profile to the Indore woman (who is a friend of her brother),” she told police. “I went to her Facebook page, copied her pictures as well as the picture of her family and posted them on the fake profile.”
Police sources say she admitted to meeting the Punjab man in 2011 and initially “enjoyed talking to him” but later got bored because of his “irritating behaviour”. She said, “He was 50 years old and has two kids but still he was desperate to meet me. I was annoyed and blocked him.”