Ghaziabad Police arrested a woman and two men for allegedly honey-trapping people to extort money using a dating app in Vasundhara colony. Nimish Patel, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Trans Hindon, said that the arrests were made in the Indirapuram police station area on Friday, PTI reported.
The gang reached out to its targets using the app after which the woman met with them in private and shot video clips. These clips were then used by the gang to blackmail the targets to extort money from them, said DCP Patel. He further added that the gang has extorted over Rs 1 crore from people through honey-trapping.
Two mobile phones and a car were also seized from them by the Ghaziabad Police.
The gang was busted after a doctor, who was trapped in their money extortion scheme filed a complaint to the police. The doctor had come in contact with the accused woman through the dating app, after which she had called the doctor to a flat. Her accomplices, Deepak and Praveen, secretly recorded the video of the private meet-up and blackmailed the doctor for money, who was forced to pay Rs 1.5 lakh to the gang, PTI reported. The police are yet to arrest two more members of the gang.
In another similar case, a gang was busted in Burari where four people, including a woman, were arrested for honey-trapping over 50 people on the pretext of giving them a massage.
The accused posed as NGO members and police officers and threatened the victims to implicate them in fake cases to dupe them. The accused woman, identified as Hemlata, a beauty parlour owner, was also arrested earlier for extortion.
The arrests were made after a 46-year-old victim, resident of Shahdara, filed a complaint that he had befriended the woman after calling on a number he got from a social networking site, TOI reported.
In 2022, a woman was arrested for allegedly befriending men on Instagram to later extort money from them after calling them on a date in Delhi's Kalkaji area. The woman's accomplice posed as a cop and threatened victims to arrest them for rape, which led them to pay up forcefully.
The couple was caught when they abducted a man and were taking him to an isolated place, but were spotted by an auto driver who helped the police to nab them.