Honey Trap Gangs Lay Bait For City's Rich

Cops go after 5 blackmailing rackets that have targeted builders and jewellers with secretly filmed intimate clips

- Ajay Kumar

A sleaze shocker came from Indore and Bhopal last month when several members of a high-tech and well-organized honey trap and blackmailing racket themselves fell into a police net.

They were using spy cams in lipsticks, goggles and mobile phones to film top bureaucrats and politicians in compromising positions so that money — as big as Rs 3 crore in one case — could be extracted from them. Several clips, some of them apparently morphed, had already flooded many social media platforms.

Now what a MAIL TODAY investigation has revealed closer home is even more shocking: in the National Capital, honey trapping has become an organized crime and cases of blackmailing and extortion are spiraling.

Five similar gangs are targeting the rich in Delhi-NCR with secretly filmed private videos to extort crores, the weeks-long probe shows.

The targets include top builders, hoteliers, architects, doctors, jewelers and lawyers who are trapped by “attractive women of other nationalities” posing as real estate buyers, patients, shoppers, and litigants.

The gangs hire techies to extract personal and financial details of their targets or purchase the same from dubious call centers and web portals. Some even rope in legal advisers to avoid arrest.

For payments, the gangs ask their targets to leave their debit cards at designated places and share passwords. Cards are returned later.

1. JAHANGIR GANG

It has blackmailed around a dozen men from Delhi and extorted more than Rs 2 crore from them in the last few months, police sources told Mail Today.

The targets include a doctor, a hotelier, an architect, a bakery shop owner, two AC showroom dealers, three real estate developers and a travel agent.