Mumbai Shocker: Engineering student arrested for threatening girl with her morphed images

Mumbai, Sep 10: In a shocking incident here, a 20-year-old engineering student was arrested for threatening and trying to extort money from his Facebook friend.

Prathmesh Salunke was arrested on Monday, Sep 7 for threatening his Facebook friend saying that her morphed images would be posted on various social networking sites. The accused also demanded Rs 7,000 from the victim.

Prathmesh is a third-year Electrical engineering student at a college in Navi Mumbai. The incident came to light when the 15-year-old victim along with her parents filed an FIR at Charkop police station. The FIR was resgistered on Sunday, Sep 6, later the case was transferred to the Crime Branch.

The accused said several friend request to the girl in last six months. When Prathmesh realised that the girl rejected all his requests, he befriended some of her friends.

The accused then sent another friend request to the victim. The girl accepted his friend request when she saw some of her friends in the list. Though she has accepted the request last month, she started chatting only a fortnight ago.

The victim in her complaint has said that Prathmesh would try to flirt with her every time they chatted.

And on Saturday, Sep 5, he sent her a pornographic image with their faces morphed on it.

The accused started threatening the girl saying that he will upload it on various social networking sites if she refused to pay him Rs 7,000. The girl informed her parents and a case was filed in
the Charkop police station on Sep 6. The case was then handed over to the Unit XI.

The probe team was clueless in the initial stage as no phone number of the accused was available. So the investigation team created a fake Facebook profile and a friend request was sent to Prathmesh. He accepted the request immediately. The cops tricked him and obtained his phone number. The cops located his residence based on his cellphone number and the IP address.

According to media reports, Senior Inspector Chimaji Adhav from Unit XI said that the accused secured the girl's photo from her Facebook profile and cleverly morphed it onto a pornographic image along with his.
Prathmesh after morphing several images, sent the victim one as a sample and threatened to upload them on social media if she didn't pay him. The victim is not at all acquainted with the accused.

The accused will be handed over to the Charkop police for further inquiry. He was booked under Sections 354 (outraging a woman's modesty) and 385 (extortion) of the IPC.

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