VADODARA, India — An official with India’s cybercrime police agency has acknowledged an upsurge in cases of criminals blackmailing people for watching adult content online, thanks to local laws that make such viewing illegal.
Leading establishment newspaper The Times of India reported on the trend on Saturday, shaming the victims with a debunked pseudomedical description in its headline: “Porn Addicts Getting Threats of Extortion in Vadodara.”
According to the newspaper, several victims of fraud — some of them elderly — encountered a 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 his details have been noted by the union home ministry,” the report explained, describing one victim's experience. “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 enables the blackmailers to succeed.
“There have been instances of people being blackmailed by citing illegality of watching porn websites,” the official noted, adding that the 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 Times of India goes on to report that “ethical hackers and cyber experts are getting flooded” with requests from fraud victims attempting to combat this threat to their reputations. 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 police complaints would mean their families would also learn about the incidents.
“In fact, most victims don’t want to file a police complaint,” Bhusawalkar told the paper.
Last week, as XBIZ reported, India’s increasingly powerful Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology 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.