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Bengaluru: A 36-year-old woman fell victim to blackmail by agents of a loan app, who allegedly circulated "morphed" explicit photographs of her and her daughter to multiple contacts in her phonebook.
N Rashmi (name changed), residing in Wilson Garden and employed in a private firm, informed the police that she downloaded and installed AMC Credit Park — an online loan app not available on either the Play Store or App Store — on February 7 through a third-party link. On the same day, Rs 2,400 was credited to her Citibank account three times.
Rashmi was perplexed by these transactions since she did not avail a loan. She also began receiving harassing calls from individuals claiming to be agents of the loan app she downloaded.
"They demanded repayment despite no request being raised by me," she stated in her complaint.
Rashmi said she received calls from 10 different numbers, many of which displayed country codes from Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the US.
However, police officials informed DH that the calls' origins might be varied, as operators of such loan apps often utilise Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for making internet calls and masking their IP addresses.
To her dismay, the loan sharks threatened to disseminate obscene photographs of her and her daughter to her contact list, as the victim unwittingly granted access while installing the app. The FIR noted that some of the victim's contacts indeed received the doctored photographs.
The following day, Rashmi sought assistance from the police.
A case has been lodged at the Central Cyber Economic and Narcotics Crime (CEN) police station under sections 66D (punishment for cheating by personation by using computer resource) and 67 (punishment for publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) of the Information Technology (IT) Act.
Further investigations are on, according to the police.