Gujarat: Sextortion makes for 50% of cybercrime complaints

AHMEDABAD/VADODARA: Social media butterflies, be warned. If you are the kind that does not mind answering video calls from unknown numbers, then steel yourself for a flurry of sextortion threats likely coming your way.
More than half of the 5,000 social media-related cybercrime cases registered on Gujarat's cybercrime helpline are pertaining to sextortion calls. It's not men alone who are the sweet targets of these sextortionists. Over the past one year, there have also been cases of fraudsters disrobing themselves on video calls, targeting women in Ahmedabad.
Between January 2022 and March 4 this year, around 2,382 of the 5,091 social media-related complaints registered with the cybercrime helpline were pertaining to sextortion calls. Ahmedabad and Surat cities lead the pack in the number of sextortion complaints, registering 583 and 327 cases respectively. Vadodara and Rajkot have reported 186 and 119 complaints respectively on the helpline.
"The criminals click screenshots of their nude selves along with the faces of the hapless victims who pick their calls. They then disconnect the call and use the screenshot to sextort their victims," says a senior Ahmedabad police official.
"Online sextortion is vastly under-reported because of social stigma and the fact that the complaints registered by district police stations are not collated on a daily basis," says a senior CID crime official.
In Ahmedabad city, Sola, Ghatlodia, Chandkheda, Paldi, Vastrapur, Vejalpur and Nikol police stations register the maximum number of complaints. In Surat city, police jurisdictions of Umara, Varachcha road, Sarthana, Punagam, Katodara have maximum cases reported on the helpline.
While men are the usual targets of the sextortionists, Ahmedabad cybercrime police say that they have also come across cases where women have been sextorted. In 2020 and 2021, two or three such cases were reported, but in 2022 there were at least 20 calls targeting women. "Dark web marketplaces usually see huge amounts of card data being dumped. The fraudsters access this data to trap gullible women in sextortion calls," says the Ahmedabad police officer.