The Cyber Crime Police on Friday arrested a 22-year old youth from Pandrangi area under Padmanabham Police Station limits in Visakhapatnam city for harassing a girl of the village on a social media website.

Police said the accused had created a fake Facebook profile in the victim’s name and was posting objectionable content through the profile. After his arrest, the youth reportedly told police that this was his way of taking revenge on the girl for spurning his proposal.

Young women often find themselves becoming victims of such harassment on social media, with even celebrities reporting similar experiences of trolling and abuse on social media.

Recently, Telugu film actress Rakul Preet Singh was harassed on social media for posting a picture of herself.

Complaints pour in

According to the Visakhapatnam Cyber Crime Police, they are receiving at least 10 complaints pertaining to nuisance on social media every month, with a majority of those coming from engineering college campuses in the city. “We appeal to girls not to share their pictures on public domain or with strangers. Accepting friend requests from strangers on social media is risky. A number of fraudsters have been booked under the IT Act and if the victim is a woman, we are filing a charge-sheet. Simultaneously, we are conducting awareness programmes for the youth,” Cyber Crime Inspector V. Gopinath told The Hindu.

Delving into details of such crimes, the Cyber Crime Police say that two types of complaints are being received by them pertaining to social media — harassment by trolls through fake accounts and morphing of photos.

In some cases, the victim's pictures or videos posted by them on their social media accounts such as Facebook and Instagram or even WhatsApp are downloaded by miscreants, who then morph the pictures and repost them on social media along with the phone number of the victim to encourage further harassment.

“Sometimes, the miscreants create fake IDs by downloading pictures of girls and establishing contact with several persons. The miscreants offer sexual favours to strangers on the internet through the fake profiles and extort money. They do not talk over the phone and communicate only through text messages. In several cases, the women stumble across the fake profiles and report them to the service provider to ban the accounts. So many of these cases do not reach police stations,” said a senior police officer working at the Cyber Crime Police Station.

Photo-morphing

Police spoke of how even friends, acquaintances and in some cases even family members can turn out to be perpetrators of crimes like posting morphed photographs of women on the internet.

“Almost all such cases are reported from college campuses. People who are known to the victims, such as friends or classmates, morph the victim’s photograph and post them on social media,” said Mr. Gopinath.

He cited an example of a girl studying at a reputed college who morphed the picture of her friend and posted it on social media after the victim began a relationship with the former’s ex-boyfriend.

In another case, a man was found to have uploaded morphed photographs of his ex-wife after they were separated.