K-pop, cartoon & online games: Ghaziabad sisters spent 20 hours on phone daily

Ghaziabad: Police probing the alleged suicides of three sisters in Bharat City have recovered incremental data from a mobile phone sold by their father days before their deaths, finding that the girls spent almost 20 hours a day on the device watching Korean content, cartoons and gaming. The handset — picked up from an electronics shop in Shalimar Garden on Monday — also contains viewing and gaming material that the sisters listed in their suicide note last week, police said.The three sisters — aged 16, 14 and 12 — were found lying next to each other on the society's premises, directly below their ninth-floor window, on Feb 4. They were taken to hospital and declared dead on arrival.
Police said that the phone was sold by their father, Chetan Kumar, to the Shalimar Garden shop for Rs 15,000 about 15 days before the incident. The device had been sent for forensic examination to retrieve deleted data and map the girls' online activity and contacts.An officer said the phones were central to establishing what the sisters were consuming online and whether they were in touch with anyone outside the family. Data recovered so far shows the sisters were heavily invested in Korean culture, with K-pop featuring most prominently.The cops also found material linked to games named in the suicide note, including the horror titles Poppy Playtime, The Baby in Yellow, Ice Cream Man, Evil Nun and Ice Game. Patil said police had already sent a report to govt seeking a ban on these five games."A request was sent to govt to ban these five games. As of now, we are trying to recover the other phone that the girls' father had sold off three months ago. We also need to scan the social media activity of the girls," the officer said.The recovered phone's YouTube history also shows an extensive list of Korean and Chinese songs, police said. Apart from Korean drama and films, the girls watched Chinese, Thai and Japanese content. Gaming videos and cartoons also featured prominently, such as Doraemon, Shinchan, PJ Masks, Masha and the Bear, Shimmer and Shine and Peppa Pig.The sisters' increasing fixation with everything Korean has also drawn attention to their isolation and growing dependence on an online fantasy life. The girls had stopped going to school after Covid and had few, if any, friends, becoming increasingly dependent on each other and on their phones. They had also started a YouTube channel in 2025 focused on K-dramas and cartoon characters, which grew to more than 2,000 followers, but was deleted about 10 days before their alleged suicides.The channel, police said, was removed after their father objected to their escalating obsession with Korean culture.A private tutor, who taught them briefly, also told police and family members that the girls introduced themselves to her with Korean names — Maria, Aliza and Cindy — and claimed they had been adopted from Korea and China."They were very weak in studies. When I gave them basic calculations, like additions and multiplications, they failed to even recognise numbers. When I asked them about their Korean names, they said they had been adopted from China and Korea. I asked their father about it. He told me about their obsession," said the tutor, who stopped teaching them after a few sessions.It was around six months ago that Kumar had bought two phones for the eldest daughter and her 14-year-old half-sister, believing they would become "famous like YouTubers". He sold one of the phones three months ago, and the other one just 15 days before the suicides.