: From sextortion to OLX scams, Mewat is way ahead of Jamtara in cyber crimes #IndiaNEWS #National,Crime/Disaster/Accident By Shekhar Singh/Supriya RameshMewat/New Delhi, Feb 19 (IANS) After Jamtara,

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From sextortion to OLX scams, Mewat is way ahead of Jamtara in cyber crimes #IndiaNEWS #National ,Crime/Disaster/Accident
By Shekhar Singh/Supriya RameshMewat/New Delhi, Feb 19 (IANS) After Jamtara, the Mewat region spread over three states Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh is the new ground zero of cyber scamming.
The new satellite towns and villages that are spread across in the region are mounting countless scams on hapless cellphone owners across the country.
Steps ahead from Jamtara cyber thugs, the scammers in Mewat region, falling under three states jurisdictions, also keep the police on their toes.
Sextortion is their new skill and they leave no stone unturned to churn out money from innocent people after threatening and blackmailing the victims of uploading their morphed pictures and videos online.
Catching one scammer doesnt end the problem as 10 others pop up and they are even trained in the Mewat villages by the akkas.
Now, the modus operandi of scammers is so popular among the youngsters in the region that this has become predominantly a leaderless crime racket.
There are no kingpins and just a smartphone and a SIM is needed to scam and blackmail.
Delhi Police are also now keeping an eye on the young scammers operating from the Mewat region after several cases of scams revealed that the cyber cheats were operating from the region.
Not only sextortion, the Mewat scammers also lure people through OLX in which they pretend to sell possessions on the online marketplace and then either physically lure victims to the pick-up locations or scam them virtually.
These scammers have not even spared Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Pragya Thakur and a Shiv Sena MLA.
Unlike Kolkatas phishing industry, which has office buildings and call centres, the Mewat scam is a bit of an unstructured cottage industry.
The Mewat gangs modus operandi is quite different. The scammers also include truck drivers, who are natives of the region.
The truck drivers make suspicious calls from non-descript highways using fake SIM cards, said a police officer.
Recently, even the Delhi High Court said that it is saddening to see people are not aware that once they give access to their contacts and images to an app they have downloaded on their mobile phones, the developer, in case of being a criminal, misuses images, morphs them and sends them in inappropriate form to their social contacts, and thereafter, blackmails the users.
The observations came while dismissing the bail plea of a man accused of extorting lakhs of rupees from several people by morphing pictures stored in their mobiles, and sending them to their relatives.
In case such criminals are not dealt with a heavy hand and are enlarged on bail while there is material on record to show transactions have taken place from their mobile phones or computers and inappropriate morphed images of people have been sent and they have been blackmailed, it may send a wrong signal to society that such offences can be committed and one can get away with these easily, said Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma.

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