Facebook harass nets one ... pretending to be a woman accused used to befriend then tagged to objectionable photographs and videos...

TT, 9 March 2019, Salt Lake: A 21-year-old man who dropped out of school after Class X has been arrested for allegedly morphing photographs of several women and creating Facebook profiles in their names.

A police team from the cyber crime police station in Salt Lake picked up Sashi Kumar Pandey from his house in East Burdwan's Kalna on Thursday afternoon.

Pandey, who was arrested based on a complaint lodged by a 25-year-old woman with the cyber crime police station, has apparently told officers that he used to befriend women and upload objectionable photographs and videos on Facebook by morphing their pictures.

"Pandey had sent the complainant a friend request from a Facebook profile in which he pretended to be a woman," an officer of the cyber crime police station said. "The woman accepted the request and started interacting with him on Facebook Messenger thinking the person was a woman." A week after she had accepted the friend request, she was allegedly tagged in a number of objectionable photographs and videos that had been created by morphing her profile and cover photographs on Facebook.

"She blocked the `woman's' profile after coming to know that `she' had tagged her in the videos and the photographs," the officer said.

A few days later, several of her friends alerted her that a fake profile in her name had been created and objectionable photographs and videos had been posted on it.

Bidit Mondal, inspector-incharge of the Salt Lake cyber crime police station, said they tracked down Pandey through the IP address of the phone and the computer from where the friend request was sent and the photographs and videos were uploaded.

An IP address is like the fingerprint of any electronic device connected to the Internet.

"Pandey said during questioning that he had created fake profiles in the name of several women," Mondal said.

The accused has been booked under IPC sections 354D (stalking), 500 (defamation) and 507 (criminal intimidation) and under the IT act. If convicted, he can be sentenced to jail for up to three years.

A Salt Lake court has remanded in judicial custody for 14 days.