Porn addicts getting threats of extortion in Vadodara

VADODARA: Harish

Chauhan

(name changed), a 72-two-year-old insurance agent, was alarmed when a pop-up appeared on his phone when he was surfing a porn website. It read that surfing porn websites is illegal and his details have been noted by the union home ministry. He was asked to pay a certain amount to avoid getting penalised and prevent his details from getting public.

A panicked Chauhan contacted a city-based cyber expert

Mayur Bhusawalkar

a few weeks ago. “He felt that hackers had got access to his contact list and his surfing details would be circulated among his friends and relatives,”

Bhusawalkar

said. Chauhan asked Bhusawalkar to help him in cleaning up his phone and also try to track down the hackers.

Ethical hackers and cyber experts are getting flooded with such harried people who are addicted to watching porn. However, fearing embarrassment they avoid approaching the police. Experts say they have got requests from at least 15 people from Vadodara, Ahmedaad and Surat in the last few months where the surfers have either been duped of money or blackmailed.

“When I asked Chauhan to approach the police, if he wanted the gang to be caught, he flatly refused. It was too embarrassing for him to admit to the cops that he surfed porn websites and filing a police complaint would mean that his family would also learn about it. In fact, most victims don’t want to file a police complaint,” Bhusawalkar told TOI.

Ahmedabad-based cyber expert Sagar Joshi, who helps the railway police, added, “There is a rise in the number of such cases as many people end up paying the money to save their reputation and recover their phone data. In some instances, the gang even threatens the victim by stating that they have access to his live location.”

“Some of the IP addresses I tracked led me to Jharkhand and even Malaysia,” said Bhusawalkar.

A cybercrime police official said, “There have been instances of people being blackmailed by citing illegality of watching porn websites. The frauds make websites that are very similar to the authentic government sites and the language they use is so convincing that victims end up paying money.”

(With inputs by Ashish Chauhan in Ahmedabad)