KARACHI: A judicial magistrate on Wednesday remanded in police custody a man booked for his alleged involvement in hacking WhatsApp accounts of some women and using them to blackmail them.

The Eidgah police on Tuesday arrested the suspect and registered a case against him under Sections 506 (criminal intimidation) and 294 (obscene acts and songs) of the Pakistan Penal Code, read with Section 25-D (penalty for causing annoyance) of the Telegraph Act.

On Wednesday, the investigating officer (IO) of the case brought the suspect before Judicial Magistrate (South) Asim Aslam and sought his police custody for interrogation.

The IO informed the court that a woman approached the police and stated that on Nov 12 she had received a message on her WhatsApp from the number of her daughter’s friend, and later an unknown person began speaking to her using the same number.

The same person started sending her indecent messages, after which she approached the girl’s mother, who informed her that her daughter’s WhatsApp account had been hacked and that others had also received similar messages from the same number.

She said she informed her husband, who advised her to continue talking to the person and asked him to come to the Ranchore Line area. Later, the suspect walked into the trap, where residents apprehended him and handed him over to the police.

According to the FIR, during initial grilling, the suspect disclosed that he hacked various people’s social media accounts through malicious links and contacted women, offering them money in order to engage in inappropriate acts. He further confessed that he recorded their videos and later used them for blackmail.

The police claimed to have recovered multiple videos of different women from the suspect’s mobile phones.

After hearing the IO, the court remanded him in police custody for three days.

Published in Dawn, November 20th, 2025