Rajkot: The Morbi Cybercrime Police arrested a serial cybercriminal accused of hacking into the WhatsApp accounts of school parents and beauty parlour professionals to extort money.The accused, Pritesh alias Gogi Prajapati, employed a deceptive modus operandi that primarily targeted women. Utilising a caller identification app to gather contact details, he would call his people — often parents of children attending schools in Morbi — pretending to be a school administrator. He would then trick them into sharing a one-time password (OTP) by claiming it had been sent to their phones by mistake.Once the OTP was provided, Prajapati gained control of the victims’ WhatsApp accounts. He used this access to gain sensitive information from the phones and thereafter used it to blackmail individuals and extort money.The Morbi police got two cases in which one victim paid Rs 30,000 while another got a ransom call to pay Rs 10 lakh. He also targeted parents in hacked school WhatsApp groups, demanding money under the guise of collecting school fees.The FIR was registered against the accused on July 4 under various BNS sections and the IT Act.Investigators found Prajapati is a habitual offender with a history of 13 previous offences across multiple cities in Gujarat, including Amreli, Junagadh, Rajkot, Valsad and Navsari. To evade capture, he frequently travelled in the general compartments of trains and fled to Goa after committing his crimes.
