KARACHI: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Thursday claimed to have arrested a suspect who allegedly lured widowed and divorced women through social media on the pretext of marrying them and later blackmailed them, said FIA’s Cyber Crime Wing (CCW) deputy director Abdul Ghaffar.

He added that the FIA received a complaint from a woman on Dec 3 and after a proper inquiry arrested the suspect, a matriculate resident of New Karachi, who had gained expertise in computer technology.

The held suspect, pretending to be an officer of a “fake” security agency, took them to a hotel in Clifton, where he had installed secret cameras with which he made ‘objectionable’ videos and later started blackmailing the women.

He extracted Rs600,000 from one woman and Rs30,000 from another after making their videos. During investigation, it transpired that the held man had created a Facebook ID with the name ‘Wajdan Ali’ and claimed that he was a “well-wisher of the widows” and could marry them.

Suspect extorted money for deleting uploaded ‘objectionable’ pictures

He contacted the complainant woman and asked her to meet him and that he wanted to solemnise nikah with her. The complainant met her where he showed her “fatwas” and married her without a nikahkhwan. He would tell the women that he could not make the marriage public because the “agency personnel”, where he was a key officer, would hound him and his wife.

After the ‘nikah’, the held suspect made her videos.

A few days later, the complainant received a call from an unknown number and the caller told her that an ‘objectionable’ video of her was with him and if she wanted to get it deleted, she must pay him Rs200,000. To get rid of the blackmailer, the woman sent him Rs30,000 through a mobile payment platform on Dec 8.

The suspect also uploaded her videos on Google and WhatsApp.

He said that the modus operandi of the suspect was that he introduced himself as an official of an “agency” with a fake name, to send bulk messages on Facebook messenger to females stating that he “wants a partner, and that he is willing to partner with widowed or divorced women”.

“He would lure women to chat with him on virtual American numbers which he would generate using an application on the internet,” said the cybercrime wing official.

The suspect had assumed that such numbers were not traceable and he would change numbers frequently and ask girls to chat over WhatsApp as Facebook was not secure.

“He would then insist these women meet him at a “hotel”, where he would record videos of the women,” said Abdul Ghaffar. “He would then use the videos to blackmail the women and extort large sums from them.”

The FIA was also probing the role of the hotel.

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2018