A youngster who blackmailed girls after collecting their intimate and personal pictures after creating fake Instagram accounts, was arrested by the Hyderabad Cyber Crime police here on Friday.
The accused, Chilviary Santosh Kumar, is a resident of Abdullapurmet in Rangareddy district.
In August last, police received a complaint from the parents of a 19-year-old girl who was being blackmailed by the accused. She had received a friend request on Instagram from an unknown account who introduced himself as her schoolmate, and subsequently they shared personal contact details with each other.
They became good friends then he proposed to her and they shared their personal pictures with each other on WhatsApp, Joint Commissioner of Police (Detective Department) Avinash Mohanty said.
“Later, the girl came to know that Mr. Kumar had cheated other girls in the same manner and started avoiding him and blocked his social media accounts. Then, he started to call her continuously and threatened and blackmailed her by sending her private pictures,” he said. Based on their complaint, a case was registered and Mr. Kumar was arrested on Friday.
As per the preliminary investigation, Mr. Kumar was learnt to be chatting on social media platforms with unknown girls by creating fake accounts for ‘time pass’.
Mr. Mohanty requested the general public not to share personal and private pictures with others and do not accept anonymous friend requests on social media platforms.
“Take precautions while uploading personal pictures on social media platforms in open source and keep personal profiles in private or lock mode,” he added.
