VADODARA, India — An official with India’s Cybercrime Police agency admitted this weekend to the press an upsurge of people being successfully blackmailed by criminals for watching adult content websites because of the “illegality” of doing so according to local laws.
Leading establishment newspaper the Times of India reported on the trend on Saturday, shaming the victims with a debunked pseudomedical description, headlining it “Porn Addicts Getting Threats of Extortion in Vadodara.”
According to the newspaper, several victims of fraud — some of them elderly — were contacted via a phone pop-up while visiting an adult website.
The pop-up mimicked an official government ministry supposedly tasked with monitoring online activity for violations of India’s expansive obscenity laws.
“It read that surfing porn websites is illegal and [the victim’s] details have been noted by the union home ministry,” the report explained. “He was asked to pay a certain amount to avoid getting penalized and prevent his details from getting public.”
A cybercrime police official confirmed to the newspaper that the existence of the porn ban is what helps the blackmailers be successful.
“There have been instances of people being blackmailed by citing illegality of watching porn websites,” the official noted. “The frauds [i.e., extortionists] make websites that are very similar to the authentic government sites and the language they use is so convincing that victims end up paying money.”
A Flood of Fraud Victims
The paper mentioned that “ethical hackers and cyber experts are getting flooded” with requests from fraud victims attempting to combat this threat to their reputation.
The experts noted a multitude of requests from Vadodara, Ahmedaad and Surat in the last few months “where the surfers have either been duped of money or blackmailed.”
Cyber expert Mayur Bhusawalkar said that victims find it “too embarrassing to admit to the cops that they surfed porn websites.”
The criminals are emboldened by the victims’ belief that “filing a police complaint would mean that his family would also learn about it.
“In fact, most victims don’t want to file a police complaint,” Bhusawalkar told the Times of India.
Last week, as XBIZ reported, India’s increasingly powerful Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) published proposed new rules that would give the government sweeping control over social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit, digital news publications and streaming sites — including the power to punish them for “porn” and “obscenity.”
India is currently in the middle of a media-driven “porn panic” centered around reporting on a case involving Bollywood celebrities who invested in an X-rated online startup.