NEW DELHI: A 20-year-old youth has been arrested for allegedly extorting Rs 90,000 from a woman on the pretext of retrieving her blocked social media account, police said on Thursday.
According to police, the accused, Juned Beg, a resident of Jamia Nagar, had falsely reported the account as abusive and later promised her to recover it in exchange for money.
On March 29, a woman complained that her Instagram account with more than eight lakh followers had got blocked, after which one Sam texted her on WhatsApp saying he could unblock her account, a senior police officer said.
The accused initially charged her Rs 10,000 and later demanded more money saying he would get her account deleted, following which she transferred a total of Rs 80,000 to the different bank accounts provided by the fraudster, the officer said.
During the investigation, the police traced the mobile number to Beg and arrested him from Zakir Nagar near Batla House, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Dwarka) M Harsha Vardhan said.
Beg disclosed that he used to target Instagram users with lakhs of followers and once he spotted any abusive content on their accounts, he used to report them to Instagram, he said.
Once the accounts got blocked, Beg demanded money from the account holders to recover them, Vardhan added.