Ahmedabad’s cybercrime branch has registered nine cases and arrested eight people, including a woman, in an operation targeting alleged cyberstalking, online abuse, identity theft and blackmail against women. Police have also initiated action against three teenagers accused of turning a garba influencer’s videos into defamatory clips to gain followers.
The 21-year-old influencer regularly posted videos of her garba performances, several of which had gone viral. According to police, the three accused, aged between 16 and 17, allegedly edited hundreds of her videos and portrayed her as their “wife” or “girlfriend”. Some clips allegedly described her as a sex worker. Police said the accused also posted objectionable messages and exposed the phone numbers of the influencer’s parents.
The teenagers allegedly believed that using a popular creator’s videos would help them attract more views, likes and followers. Police said the accused had only about 400 to 500 followers before allegedly beginning to edit and circulate the influencer’s content. Two of them are Class 12 students, while the third is a school dropout who works as a daily-wage labourer.
Police have deleted around 150 allegedly defamatory videos and are working to identify and remove the remaining material. The investigation is also examining how the teenagers obtained the phone numbers of the influencer’s parents. Police said the accused allegedly used their parents’ mobile numbers to create social-media accounts.
The cases were registered under Mission Cyber Rakshika, an Ahmedabad cybercrime branch initiative focused on complaints involving women and children. According to a statement issued by the branch, the complaints involved fake accounts on Instagram and Facebook. Women police officers counselled the complainants, whose identities were kept confidential during the registration of the cases.
The alleged motives in the nine cases varied. Police said some incidents followed personal disputes, failed relationships or disagreements. In one case, a man allegedly created a fake Instagram profile using a woman’s photograph, impersonated her while contacting her husband’s friends and uploaded objectionable photographs to the account’s stories.
In another case, a man allegedly circulated a video claiming that a woman was involved in an extramarital relationship. Police said the accused had a personal dispute with the woman following a confrontation involving his mother and the woman’s friend. Other complaints involved alleged fake accounts, the circulation of objectionable videos to relatives and attempts to disrupt a woman’s engagement after she refused to marry an accused person.
Police also alleged that a woman created a fake Instagram account in the name of a female colleague and used it to message people. The alleged motive was resentment over the colleague’s friendship with a male co-worker.
The cybercrime branch said it was using technical analysis of information obtained from social-media platforms to trace the accused in Ahmedabad and other parts of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The department said it was continuing to monitor online platforms for fake accounts and objectionable content targeting women and children.
The Cyber Rakshika team includes 10 women police officers. Police have appealed to people who encounter such material to report it to the team so that accounts and content can be investigated and, where possible, removed.
