Morphing now a major tool for criminal extortion, blackmail

Last year, All India Mahila Congress national secretary M Hazeena Sayed was shocked to see her morphed pictures online. A miscreant had allegedly pasted her face on the body of a chimpanzee and posted it on Facebook. Just two days ago, the Kumaran Nagar police arrested four youngsters, who threatened a 21-year-old engineering student telling her that her ‘nude pictures’ would be released on social media, if she failed to pay up. The girl had already paid more than Rs 8 lakh to the boy who was her ex-boyfriend since 2014, before she finally mustered the courage to tell her father about the blackmail. 

“Morphing has become so easy  with all the advanced tools available. There are groups who manipulate attractive-looking profile pictures of girls on social media and morph their faces onto nude images downloaded from the net. We get about 10 such complaints in a month,” said Kanagaraj Joseph, Assistant Commissioner of Police, cyber crime, told DTNext. 

Recently the Chennai police had arrested a cop, who was an intelligence officer attached to a joint commissioner, after he morphed the picture of a businessman’s daughter and tried to extort money from her father. Earlier, only celebrities faced this problem, but now several college students and working professionals are being targeted. “In most of the cases of morphing, we have found out that the accused tried to contact the victim demanding money or sexual favours. However, even after we crack the case, the victims request us not to register a proper case but to warn the accused and leave them,” Kanagaraj Joseph said. 

As of now, there are no laws that prevent or monitor the sales of morphing software. “Many girls have committed suicide after being shamed publicly with morphed pictures, but there are still no laws in place to monitor the use of such invasive cyber applications,” another police officer added.