Elaborate 'plot' by spurned techie

Bangalore: A Hyderabad techie who allegedly posed as an Intelligence Bureau officer, morphed the pictures of a college acquaintance who spurned his advances and emailed them to her fiancé has been arrested. Raju Boranchi, 26, was picked up last Saturday based on a complaint by the Bangalore-based software engineer that he had morphed her pictures with pornographic images, police said. A special team of Bangalore police went to Hyderabad to arrest and bring Raju to Bangalore where he has been remanded in judicial custody. He has been accused of criminal intimidation and booked under several sections of the information technology Act. Raju works for an IT company in Hyderabad and the woman for one in Whitefield here, said the deputy commissioner of police (Bangalore South-East), M.B. Boralingiah. He confirmed that they had studied in the same engineering college in Hyderabad. While in college, Raju is said to have proposed to her a few times but she turned him down. He, however, kept calling her up. Even after she moved to Bangalore a few months ago for her job, Raju wouldn't give up. "He used eight different mobile numbers to call her all these months despite her warnings," said a police source. He also created a fake Facebook profile in a woman's name to track her activities. Around two months ago, he allegedly posed as an IB officer and called her using a fake accent to "caution" her about "data theft" from her email account. The woman parted with her email login details thinking he was actually an IB officer, the police said. "Since then, Raju would regularly log in to her email account and monitor her mails. One day he figured out that she was engaged to be married," said a police source who is part of the team that tracked him to his Hyderabad office on Saturday. Asked how Raju had managed to get her pictures, the source said he had helped sort out some problem with her laptop in college. He has confessed to secretly copying her pictures from her laptop. He also had access to her Facebook pictures. After getting to know her marriage plans, Raju morphed her images and mailed them to her fiancé from a fake email ID, accusing her of loose morals. He got her fiancé's email address by scanning her account, police sources said. The woman's fiancé got her to lodge a complaint with HAL police station near the old airport area where she lives, the sources said. To track down Raju, Bangalore police's cyber cell identified the IP address of the computer from which he had emailed the morphed pictures. They then tracked the IP address to the IT company in Begumpet in Hyderabad where Raju worked. It was easy to identify Raju since he had used his office computer to send the pictures, the sources said.