KOLKATA: Cyber crime, especially of the pornography kind, is not a metro-centric affair any longer. Rather, increased police crackdown in the metros has prompted the operators to shift their bases to rural areas.
In the last few months, police stations in West Bengal’s remote villages are being flooded with complaints of young boys and girls either getting unknowingly trapped in such rackets or being blackmailed by operators.
A senior officer of the state crime records bureau said the maximum number of such complaints have been recorded in Birbhum, East Midnapore, Jalpaiguri and Coochbehar districts. The cyber crime division of the state CID, after preliminary investigations, has traced certain operators who clandestinely run the rackets in Bengal’s countryside.
Explaining their modus operandi, a senior CID official told DNA that the operators first rope in small cyber café operators, who are paid handsomely. “They then download nude pictures from various pornographic websites at these cafes. On these are superimposed faces of local girls and youths, clicked by the operator’s agent-cum-photographer mostly through cellphones.
The doctored nude images are then uploaded on the net,” he said. “Their targets are mainly college students and upcoming models or actors in the locality,” the CID official added.
The pictures, available in both still and video formats, rake in the moolah for the operators in two ways. “They sell the pictures or movies in MMS format to interested customers for hefty payments. At the same time, they also extort money by blackmailing the boys and girls whose faces are superimposed on the images,” the official said.
Sumanta Ray Chaudhuri
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment