In a bid to extort Rs 5 crore from a Hyderabad woman and her family, three men threatened to upload her morphed pictures on the internet. The men downloaded pictures of the woman from her social media account and edited them, adding pornographic content to it. The men then threatened to release the pictures on social media if the ransom was not paid.

Hyderabad Cyber Crime police on Saturday tracked and arrested the three men based on the complaints filed by the woman. The accused, an event manager, and his two friends collected photographs of the woman from her Facebook profile and morphed the photographs.

According to the police, the main accused, 25-year-old Manikya Vineeth from Nizamabad, was known to the woman. Vineeth used the pictures of the woman from Facebook and edited them with the help of his friends.

On August 9, Vineeth sent the edited pictures to the woman through on WhatsApp and threatened to upload the pictures if Rs 5 crore was not paid as ransom. The woman informed her family members of the threat. The woman and her family then approached the Hyderabad cyber crime police, who then constituted a team and nabbed the culprits.

“When Vineeth learnt that the woman hails from a wealthy family, he hatched a plot to extort money from her father,” said Avinash Mohanty, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), detective department, to media on Saturday.

Vineeth’s accomplices have been identified as Vaggu Ganesh, a 25-year-old photographer from Mancherial, and Gollapalli Mahesh, a 27-year-old videographer from Karimnagar.

The police seized three mobile phones and a motorbike from the accused.