Satara youth held for harassing women online

PUNE: The Khadak police on Monday arrested an unemployed youth from Satara for posing as a woman on social media and harassing several women online.
The police were acting on a complaint lodged on July 13 by a PMC corporator’s wife, who too was targeted by the suspect.
According to the complaint, the corporator’s wife accepted a friend request from one “Mansi Nimbalkar” a few months ago.For the past fortnight, her social media feed was flooded by obscene posts and photographs from Nimbalkar, in which many other women’s accounts were tagged.
According to the FIR, the complainant faced humiliation after her friends noticed these posts on her social media newsfeed and asked her about them. When this continued unabated, she decided to approach the Khadak police and the cybercrime cell.
Cybersleuths studied Nimbalkar’s profile and noticed a pattern — only women were tagged in all the posts. Police said Nimbalkar also sent sexually suggestive messages to several women on the social media site.
The cybercrime cell used the Internet protocol (IP) address and traced the account to Satara and discovered that Nimbalkar was, in fact, an unemployed 24-year-old man named Vicky Chandrakant Jadhav. They alerted the Khadak police, who dispatched a team comprising senior inspector Bharat Jadhav, inspector Uttam Chakre, and sub-inspector Umaji Rathod to arrest Jadhav.
According to the police, Jadhav is a graduate and is currently unemployed. His parents are casual workers, employed by local businesses. Police said Jadhav, finding himself alone at home and with time to kill, decided to cause mischief and created the social media profile under Mansi Nimbalkar’s name. He has been arrested under IPC Sections 354 (a) and (d), as well as the IT Act.