For the past 18 months, 21-year-old Abdul Majid, an engineering student from Hyderabad befriended 200 school going girls on Facebook and coaxed or blackmailed around half of them to share their nude photographs. He was finally arrested on Friday.
According to a report in the Times of India, Abdul had opened eight different FB accounts, posing to be women. He sent friend requests from these accounts, to girls studying in reputed schools and struck a rapport with them.
The girls, still thinking that the account was that of a woman, gradually agreed to share their secrets with their new Facebook `friend' - whom they knew as Vedika, Tanvi or Shriya, while the others were blackmailed, the report adds.
He soon asked them for a nude photograph, and the ones who refused were blackmailed with the screenshots of the secrets. He also reportedly threatened to email the chats to their parents or put it up on Facebook.
Later on, Abdul also called the girls up from different telephone numbers and demanded that they send him more pictures or threatened that he would post the earlier pictures on porn sites. He even extorted Rs 86,000 from a victim in one of the cases.
Abdul was finally arrested after an intermediate student spoke up when she was threatened and the victim's mother approached the Cyberabad police.