BENGALURU: Three students were arrested on Saturday on charges of blackmailing two other students by threatening to upload video clips of one of them on social networking sites. Parappana Agrahara police said the accused had demanded `1 lakh to not upload the video clips.
The arrested are Ashwin Moses (20), a BBM student, Akshay David (20), a Civil Engineering student, and Kiran alias Kaddi (21), a BCom student. All three are residents of Hosapalya near Electronics City and study in different colleges.
A senior police officer said the complainant, who is a student of a private college, had been to a hotel on Hosur Road on October 4. Ashwin, Akshay and Kiran were also at the hotel and stole a mobile phone from the complainant’s backpack.
Two days later, the trio went through the contents of the phone’s memory card and found private video chats between the complainant and his girlfriend, a student of fashion designing, said a police source. They contacted the complainant and his girlfriend over a social networking site and threatened that they would upload the private videos if they didn’t pay up `1 lakh.
The trio messaged them several times but the complainant and his girlfriend ignored their messages. The trio then sent one of the video clips to them and said they will post the videos if they were not paid, said the police source.
The complainant approached Parappana Agrahara police on December 1 and filed a case. A police official, pretending to be the complainant, called the trio and promised to pay them `50,000 and asked them to collect it from Singasandra near the Ganesha Temple. On Saturday evening, the trio came on a motorbike and were nabbed by police near Singasandra.
During interrogation, the trio confessed to the crime and said they needed the money to buy drugs. They had also been stealing money from their parents.