Man’s ‘missing father’ plea draws extortionist
The complainant also posted messages on social media about his father’s disappearance and appealed to people to inform him if anyone notices his missing father somewhere. He had given contact details and pictures of his father
MUMBAI: The police have launched a manhunt for a person from Bihar who allegedly made extortion calls using host Internet Protocol addresses and tried to extort money from a Bhandup resident after seeing his social media posts on his missing father.
The caller told the son that they had kidnapped his 58-year-old father, demanded ransom, and provided him with bank account details. Based on the bank details, the police have reached the branch in Gopalganj, Bihar, and identified the account holder.
The complainant’s father, a retired nationalised bank employee, left his home on July 12 without informing anyone. When he did not return home, the family approached the police and registered a missing complaint. During the investigation, police found that before leaving his house, his father had left a note in his diary that he was going on a pilgrimage.
After the ransom calls, a team was formed to search for the missing retiree. “We scanned several CCTV camera footage in Mumbai and followed the lead, which led us to Pune. He was seen in several places in CCTV footage in Pune city”, said Purshottam Karad, deputy commissioner of police. “We have been searching for him and will trace him soon.”
As the police were trying to trace his father, the complainant also posted messages on social media about his father’s disappearance and appealed to people to inform him if anyone notices his missing father somewhere. He had given contact details and pictures of his father.
However, instead of positive news, he received extortion calls from some cyber fraud, after which the police registered a kidnapping case on July 25. The caller told the complainant that they had kidnapped his father, and if he wanted to get him released, he has to pay a sum of ₹1 lakh, said a police officer.
“The caller was using the host IP address for making the ransom calls, and the calls showed his address in a foreign country. We wrote to the concerned service provider to share the destination IP of the caller and found out that the caller had shared someone else’s bank account number to get the ransom amount. This is very common, and most of the frauds do that to collect money to avoid police detection,” said a police officer.
