The bizarre story of how two girls conned many men with a 100 fake social media profiles

After spending a month trying to crack a case, the Hyderabad police have sent 22 people for counseling – there appears to be no section to register a case when a bunch of apparently besotted men have been conned into giving two women a lot of extravagant gifts.

Since August 8, the Hyderabad police had been frantically trying to trace Kajal Singh (18) and Swati Dutta (21) after their parents reported them missing to the Mir Chowk police.

But on Monday, investigating authorities found that the two girls had returned home and that they had spent the last month virtually tracking the girls across cities while the duo were busy conning men into giving them extravagant gifts. So far, the number is 20, and all of them have been sent for counseling.

“Both of them are daughters of gold businessmen and live in Old City. We registered a missing case and the first thing we did, was to track their phones through the IMEI number,” Inspector of Mir Chowk police station V. Yadagiri Reddy, told The News Minute.

“They had stopped using their SIM cards. Tracing their phones led us straight to Jagdish market," he added. Jagdish market is known to be the best place in Hyderabad to buy or sell a mobile phone if you do not care about warranty and don’t want a bill.

A massive search operation was launched and photos fed into police data base to trace the two women.

The girls were constantly on the move, with the team tracing their travels from Hyderabad to Visakhapatnam, Delhi, Dehradun and Agra before they came back to Hyderabad. Reddy says that the police had obtained CCTV footage of the girls and a cyber team began started tracking their social networking accounts.

It turned out that Kajal and Swati had opened over a 100 fake Facebook accounts and put up profile pictures of good-looking women and film actresses, and reached out to men who were only too willing to listen to their sweet talk.

"When the women were still on the move, we learnt that around 20 men, including two minors, used to frequently chat with the duo. They used to say that they were in love with the men and asked them to send money, sim cards, laptops and a lot more," Reddy said.

He also added that there were many more men who were tricked, but these twenty men lived in Hyderabad, and could be traced physically.

The cyber team then traced IP addresses and zeroed in on all the fake accounts that the women were logging in from.

According to the Times of India, one of the men duped, was the son of a police constable who gave them Rs 10,000 along with multiple SIM cards while another victim gave away a digital camera worth Rs 40,000.

When the men realized that they were duped, they stopped giving these women gifts and money. Finally, the duo came back to Hyderabad on Sunday after they ran out of money and had nowhere to go. They were taken into custody on Monday.

Even though the 20 men whom the Hyderabad police have traced have lost a lot of money, they are too embarrassed to lodge a complaint.

“Most of the men were aged between 17 and 30 years and they are being counselled, and so are the girls, to ensure that incidents like this don't recur,” Reddy added.