Engineering Student held for blackmailing teens

Police Commissioner C.V.Anand explaining case details.

Cyberabad Police on Friday arrested Abdul Majid, 21, a third year engineering student, for luring teenage school girls on Facebook to share nude photos and then threatening and blackmailing them that he would upload them on porn sites.  Police Commissioner C.V. Anand said that Abdul Majid created several fake FB accounts in the name of girls and used to send requests to school girls of reputed schools.

“The girls thought that they were chatting with another girl and sometimes shared personal details. Abdul Majid used this to force some girls to email or send to his mobile photos of themselves. He threatened many of them to implicate them in police cases and they sent nude photos believing that if they did not do say the ‘friend’ would harm them,’’ Anand said. 

On September 7, the mother of teenager lodged a complaint at Cyber Crime Police Station, Cyberabad, stating that her daughter recently accepted a friend request on her Facebook account from a girl. During chats, the ‘friend’ who was actually Abdul Majid asked her to send nude photos of herself. “When she refused to do so, Abdul Majid sent her a message that she was daughter of a senior police officer and would get the school girl implicated in a case. The girl told her mother who lodged the complaint,’’ an official said. 

During investigation, cops were stunned when they learnt that using 6 Facebook accounts in the names of girls over 18 months, Abdul Majid lured some 200 school girls to accept his friend request and share their personal details and photos.

“He used to browse FB and look for profiles of girls studying at reputed schools and send them friend requests. All his fake FB accounts had a profile photo of a girl which he picked up from internet. Since the friend request is from a girl, most of the school girls accepted it. Then Abdul would start chatting with them. After a few days, he would start asking them about their personal lives, secrets etc, and many girls fell into the trap. Then he started exploiting the girls by threatening to reveal their secrets on social media or putting the chat messages on the FB wall which will be seen by everyone, unless they obliged by sending nude photos of themselves. Many frightened girls actually sent their photos. Once he had the photos, he started calling them using different numbers and started blackmailing them to keep sending photos everyday or he would post the photos that he had on porn sites. In some cases, he insisted on meeting the girls in person and unsuccessfully tried to extract money,’’ Anand said. Cops found dozens of photos of teenage girls on his mobile phone and computer. 

Police have sounded an alert to schools and parents to advise girls.