Vadodara: Harisho Chauhan (name changed), a 72-year-old insurance agent who was surfing a porn website, became concerned when a pop-up appeared on his phone. It states that surfing porn websites is illegal and the Union Home Ministry has noted down its details. He was asked to pay a certain amount to avoid being penalized and to prevent his details from being made public.
Panicked, Chauhan approached a cyber expert in the city Mayur Bhusavalkari few weeks ago. “They thought the hackers had got access to their contact list and that their surfing details would be transmitted among their friends and relatives,” Bhusavalkari Told. Chauhan asks Bhusawalkar to help him clean his phone and also tries to track down the hackers.
Ethical hackers and cyber experts are getting into the flood of troubled people who are addicted to watching porn. However, they avoid going to the police for fear of embarrassment. Experts say they have received requests from at least 15 people in the past few months from Vadodara, Ahmadabad and Surat, where surfers have either been duped or blackmailed.
“When I asked Chauhan to approach the police if he wanted to nab the gang, he flatly refused. It was too embarrassing for him to admit to the police that he had visited pornographic websites and filing a police complaint would mean that his family would also come to know about it. In fact, most of the victims do not want to file a police complaint,” Bhusawalkar told TOI.
Ahmedabad based cyber specialist Sagar Joshi, which helps the railway police, said, “There has been an increase in the number of such cases as many people pay money to save their reputation and recover their phone data. In some cases, the gang even threatens the victim by saying that they have access to his live location.”
“Some of the IP addresses I tracked down took me to Jharkhand and even Malaysia,” Bhusawalkar said.
A cybercrime police official said, “There have been cases of people being blackmailed on the pretext of viewing illegal pornographic websites. Fraudsters create websites that are very similar to authentic government sites and the language they use is so convincing that victims have to pay.”
(with inputs from Ashish Chauhan in Ahmedabad)
Panicked, Chauhan approached a cyber expert in the city Mayur Bhusavalkari few weeks ago. “They thought the hackers had got access to their contact list and that their surfing details would be transmitted among their friends and relatives,” Bhusavalkari Told. Chauhan asks Bhusawalkar to help him clean his phone and also tries to track down the hackers.
Ethical hackers and cyber experts are getting into the flood of troubled people who are addicted to watching porn. However, they avoid going to the police for fear of embarrassment. Experts say they have received requests from at least 15 people in the past few months from Vadodara, Ahmadabad and Surat, where surfers have either been duped or blackmailed.
“When I asked Chauhan to approach the police if he wanted to nab the gang, he flatly refused. It was too embarrassing for him to admit to the police that he had visited pornographic websites and filing a police complaint would mean that his family would also come to know about it. In fact, most of the victims do not want to file a police complaint,” Bhusawalkar told TOI.
Ahmedabad based cyber specialist Sagar Joshi, which helps the railway police, said, “There has been an increase in the number of such cases as many people pay money to save their reputation and recover their phone data. In some cases, the gang even threatens the victim by saying that they have access to his live location.”
“Some of the IP addresses I tracked down took me to Jharkhand and even Malaysia,” Bhusawalkar said.
A cybercrime police official said, “There have been cases of people being blackmailed on the pretext of viewing illegal pornographic websites. Fraudsters create websites that are very similar to authentic government sites and the language they use is so convincing that victims have to pay.”
(with inputs from Ashish Chauhan in Ahmedabad)