Mewat/New Delhi: In the wake of Jamtara's cybercrimes, the Mewat region spanning across Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, has emerged as a new ground zero for cyber scams. Operating from satellite towns and villages, scammers in Mewat have honed their skills in sextortion, leveraging morphed pictures and videos to blackmail innocent victims online.

Unlike traditional organized crime, the Mewat scam operates as a leaderless crime racket with numerous scammers being trained in the region's villages. All it takes is a smartphone and a SIM card to carry out the scams, making it challenging for law enforcement to catch them all.

Reports indicate that these scammers also lure victims through platforms like OLX, posing as sellers and either physically deceiving them or scamming them virtually. Not even politicians like BJP MP Pragya Thakur and a Shiv Sena MLA have been spared by their tactics.

The Mewat gang's modus operandi is quite different, the scammers also include truck drivers, who are also natives of the region. “The truck drivers make suspicious phone calls from nondescript highways, using fake SIM cards,” said a police official.

The Haryana police had raided 14 villages of Nuh on the intervening night of April 27-28 this year.

During the raids by the police teams, a large number of suspected hackers were detained and nearly 100 accused were identified and arrested.

As per the claims of the Haryana police, as a result of these raids on cyber thugs in Nuh district, pan-India cyber frauds to the tune of Rs 100 crore and about 28,000 cases linked to these criminals had been traced.

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 users.

Its 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 offenses can be committed and one can get away with these easily,” said Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma in the order.

The cyber thugs learn just five or six lines in English. Those who are not educated to continue in the language easily switch to Hindi after the first few sentences and continue to dupe people.

As per credible sources, around 300-400 people are duped daily and each fraudster earns up to Rs 3,000 daily. The three districts together expand to 150 villages that report more than 8,000 cybercrimes, looting nearly Rs 1.6 to 2.4 crore from people.

Amzad (34), who doesn’t want to reveal his village, said that on OLX to lure victims most commonly they opt to use the fake identity of some defense personnel and concoct a believable but fabricated story about distress.

“An ad is placed on OLX to sell a bike or mobile phone, but their prices are so low that people can be easily lured. Whenever, we get a reply on our ad, for example, if a mobile phone is on sale, to lure victims, the scammers say that the phone is around two months old and being defense personnel, no one doubts them,” said Amzad.

“To avoid face-to-face interaction, the scammers give their location around 300 kilometers away from the victim’s location,” he said.

“The next step is to lure the victim and an impression of being defense personnel, talking politely and telling them, that the phone would be couriered is the key to gaining the trust and they can be then duped after asking them to pay the money in advance including the courier fee,” said Amzad.

(IANS)