Tamil Nadu

Chennai engineer held for sexually harassing and blackmailing women on social media

Written by : TNM Staff

The Adyar Cyber Cell police arrested a 25-year-old aeronautical engineer for sexually harassing young women and threatening to post their nude videos and photographs on social media. The case came to light after the father of a college student registered a complaint with the police following which the accused was traced and arrested.

According to reports, the father of the young woman registered a complaint alleging that a man befriended his daughter on social media and he has been sexually harassing and threatening to upload her pictures on social media. The father also said that the man was demanding the girl to share the contact of her friends.

The Cyber Cell police immediately took up the case for investigation based on the instructions of the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Adyar, V Vikraman. The police identified the accused as Arun Christopher (25) of Muthamizh Nagar in Tondiarpet based on the call recordings that were available with the student.

The police soon secured Arun and started the interrogations. Preliminary investigations revealed that Arun was a degree holder in aeronautical engineering and he was a temporary staffer with TANGEDCO.

Arun befriended the girl on social media and developed a relationship by pretending to love her. Within a couple of months Arun allegedly started interacting with the girl on video calls and demanded the girl to send explicit images and videos. Once the girl started to share the videos, he started threatening her with them and asked her to share the contacts of her friends, the police said.The police suspect that Arun was allegedly trying to blackmail the women into doing sexual favours. 

Arun also received the social media IDs and passwords of the girls and used to send friend requests to women in her friends circle. Arun allegedly used similar operandi to harass and threaten several women.

A few minutes before his arrest, police said Arun formatted his mobile phone and claimed he was wrongly accused of the crime since his phone did not have any videos or photos. The police seized his phone and started to trace his cloud storage account. They finally found an application 'Easy Vault' using which Arun hid all the images. The officials retrieved the videos and images of several girls.

Following this, Arun has been booked under Information Technology Act and Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act.

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