New Delhi: A 70-year-old man living in Ghaziabad was allegedly extorted of Rs 74,000 last month by scammers who blackmailed him over a WhatsApp call, using a morphed video of a retired police officer saying he had molested a girl and would be prosecuted for it “unless he agreed to settle the case”.
A complaint in the case was made to the Ghaziabad police by Monika Sharma, the daughter of the victim, Arvind Kumar Sharma, and an FIR has been filed under Section 66D of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, that deals with cheating by personation by means of a communication device.
ThePrint has seen a copy of the FIR.
“The person impersonating as a police officer called my father and harassed and threatened him of framing in fake cases. My father was harassed so badly that he once thought of committing suicide,” Monika, who filed the complaint on behalf of her father, is quoted as saying in the FIR.
Speaking to ThePrint, Monika said her father had received a video call from a person who introduced himself as a senior superintendent of police (SSP) from Delhi’s Dwarka district and alleged that her father had “molested a girl”.
A few hours prior to this call, she said, her father had accepted a “friend request” on Meta from an account that appeared to be a woman’s. He then started receiving video call requests from that account on Messenger.
She said that he did not accept the first few calls but finally answered one because of repeated requests. The call featured an unclothed woman, and the caller took screenshots of her father’s face while he answered the short-duration call, according to Monika.
She told ThePrint that her father subsequently received another call from a different number on WhatsApp, in which the man posing as an SSP threatened him with an FIR, alleging that he had molested a girl who had approached his police station.
The man at the other end also used screenshots of her father from the first video call he had answered on Meta to threaten him, saying they would be made public, Monika said.
“From those screenshots, it appeared that my father was speaking to this naked woman on video call,” she added.
She further said that her father was scared and requested the “police officer” to help him get rid of the case, at which the person suggested he talk to an individual named Sanjay about how he could be “saved”. The man shared Sanjay’s number with her father.
Sanjay asked him to first deposit Rs 5,000 in an account whose details he shared on WhatsApp. Her father deposited the sum through Jan Suvidha Kendra, a digital platform that provides money transfer services, according to Monika.
The demands for money became frequent, she said, and her father paid sums in multiple tranches, including Rs 11,000 once, adding up to Rs 74,000 in total.
Monika said half of these payments were done through Jan Suvidha Kendra and when her father exhausted his money, he took help from a colleague and transferred funds from his Paytm account to Sanjay.
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A deepfake?
According to Monika, her father finally gathered courage to reach out to relatives who found it odd that a police officer was threatening a citizen over a video call and extorting money.
Monika said the family decided to record one of the blackmail calls and she put out the video of the police officer on her work group, where one of her colleagues noticed that the officer used to be posted in Kanpur and couldn’t be involved in the case.
Her colleague, Monika told ThePrint, then shared multiple videos and photographs of the police officer in the video and asked her to search his name on Google. The family then found out that the man who appeared in the video was a retired 1993-batch IPS officer of the Uttar Pradesh cadre.
Speaking to ThePrint, assistant commissioner of police in Ghaziabad’s Kavi Nagar, Abhishek Srivastava, said the video had been sent for forensic analysis and call detail records of all numbers used by the accused in the case were being examined.
He added that bank accounts in which the senior citizen had deposited money were also being investigated.
Srivastava said the Ghaziabad Police had also written to all social media companies used by the accused and that investigating officers would proceed based on IP addresses shared with them by the companies.
Sachidanand, additional deputy commissioner of police, crime and cyber department, Ghaziabad, told ThePrint the police had written to Meta to get more information about the caller and that a team had been formed to get to “the bottom of the case”.
Another senior police officer from Ghaziabad said the case appeared to be of a morphed video. “The video and audio are completely out of sync, but detailed findings of the video call can only be done in the forensic analysis,” he told ThePrint.
According to the officer, it was too early to call it a case of deepfake — where AI is used to create convincing image, audio and video hoaxes — because an overall analysis was yet to be done.
But, he admitted, it was the first-of-its kind case in Ghaziabad where a person posing as another person of influence had extorted money from a citizen.
Last week, Union Minister of Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw chaired a high-level meeting with stakeholders, including executives from social media giants in India, to reach a consensus on formulating a law to tackle the menace of deepfakes.
“Within 10 days, we will come up with clear actionable items on four pillars,” Vaishnaw said after the meeting. “These are: improving the detection of deepfakes; preventing them from spreading rapidly; improving content reporting mechanisms on social media for synthetic media (timelines currently prescribe a 72-hour limit for removing them, beyond which firms lose legal protections for such content); and building greater awareness on deepfakes among the public.”
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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