Getting lewd calls? Check Orkut profile

While an interesting profile can help one attract all sorts of requests on a social networking site, the scary part is that a false profile can cause a person much distress.

This is what happened to Jasmine (name changed), an IT professional settled in Delhi. Three years ago, she began receiving obscene phones on her mobile, leaving her aghast. She simply could not fathom why such calls were being made to her.

Once the calls soon became a routine affair, a desperate Jasmine began conversing with one such caller and asked him how he got her number and other details about her. The caller told her that he got to know about her from the social networking site, Orkut, which had a profile of her.

When Jasmine checked, she found her profile on the site and which said she was a prostitute. The profile also had a sex video and gave her mobile number, saying she could be contacted anytime.

A panicky Jasmine registered a complaint with the police in 2007, but the police were able to make little headway in the case. Jasmine also deleted her profile from the social networking website.

Things were quiet for a while but in 2009, the nightmare began once more. She found that someone had created another negative profile of hers and also uploaded a sex film. The series of calls propositioning her began all over again.

Jasmine complained to the police once more. This time, the police investigated thoroughly and soon found that her profile was created by a person at a cyber care in Noida, near Delhi.

After further investigation, the police soon caught Gaurav Kapoor, and charged him creating Jasmine’s profile and listing her as a prostitute.

When Kapoor was revealed to Jasmine, she identified him as her classmate at her engineering college in Dehradun. She also said he used to stalk her and that she had rejected his overtures to her several times.

Kapoor taken into police custody and soon admitted that he had created a false profile of Jasmine to take revenge on her for rejecting him.

The police soon filed a plea in court to have Kapoor jailed. He in turn applied for bail, which was rejected by a Delhi court.

Kapoor then filed an appeal for bail in the Delhi high court but in vain. “It is a serious offence and the accused has played with the prestige of a girl, which is a big offence,” said Justice SL Bhayana, while rejecting Kapoor’s plea for bail on Friday.