The Mewat region, situated between the Rajasthan and Haryana states of India is emerging as the new cyber fraud hub in India.
After Jamtara, the infamous hotspot for cyber fraud cases where the young fraudsters involved in the racket would acquire SIM cards, open bank accounts, and dupe victims by posing as bank officials or representatives of telecom service providers, Mewat fraudsters have turned up with more malicious ways to dupe the online victims.
Apparently, the Mewat fraudsters leverage sextortion, a blackmail category of cybercrime, as a weapon in order to deceive victims.
The scammers target online victims while posing as young women, engaging them in conversations, and enticing the targets into sharing sexually explicit images. The scam is then followed by victims being threatened to leak the shared images unless paid.
On being asked about the case's method of operation, Yusuf, one of the suspects held for the charges of sextortion revealed his gang's modus operandi.
“It starts by writing a ‘hi’. He (the target) would usually ask about a video call. I’d do the video call. He’d be lured into going explicit. The woman on the phone does the same,” Yusuf says.
On being asked about the ‘woman', Yusuf tells the investigating officer “It’s (actually the video) on the other phone. That device is placed right under the back camera of my phone, with a video of a woman playing over. It’s like a web call.”
Reportedly, a phone on the other side uses screen recording software in order to capture the events. The victims are then threatened, and if they comply, the money is typically credited into a third party's account.
In another cyber fraud case, a suspect was held for duping online victims via digital marketplaces.
The scammer, Rahul Khan explains his fraud tactics as: Advertising expensive products for sale at deep discounts on online marketplaces such as OLX, claiming to be certain defence personnel, and fabricating a plausible story about distress.
With the stats going higher in recent years, India recorded a total of 52,974 cases of cybercrime in 2021, up from 50,035 in 2020, 44,735 in 2019, and 27,248 in 2018.
As per a report by the National Crime Records Bureau, nearly 60 percent of similar cybercrime cases were witnessed, pertaining to fraud followed by sexual exploitation (8.6 percent) and extortion (5.4 percent) in 2021.
