Case : Hosting obscene profiles

State : Tamil Nadu

City : Chennai

Sections of Law 67 of Information Technology Act 2000,469,509 of the IPC.

Background The complainant stated that some unknown person had created an e-mail ID using her name and had used this ID to post messages on five Web pages describing her as a call-girl along with her contact numbers. As a result she started receiving a lot of offending calls from men.
Investigation After the complainant heard about the Web pages with her contact details, she created a username to access and view these pages. Using the same log-in details, the investigating team accessed the Web pages where these profiles were uploaded. The message had been posted on five groups, one of which was a public group. The investigating team obtained the access logs of the public group and the message to identify the IP addresses used to post the message. Two IP addresses were identified. The ISP was identified with the help of publicly available internet sites. A request was made to the ISPs to provide the details of the computer with the IP addresses at the time the messages were posted. They provided the names and addresses of two cyber cafes located in Mumbai to the police. The investigating team scrutinized the registers maintained by the cyber cafes and found that in one case the complainant’s name had been signed into the register. The team also cross-examined the complainant in great detail. During one of the meetings she revealed that she had refused a former college mate who had proposed marriage. In view of the above the former college mate became the prime suspect. Using this information the investigating team, with the help of Mumbai police, arrested the suspect and seized a mobile phone from him. After the forensic examination of the SIM card and the phone, it was observed that phone had the complainant’s telephone number that was posted on the internet. The owner of the cyber cafes also identified the suspect as the one who had visited the cyber cafes. Based on the facts available with the police and the sustained interrogation the suspect confessed to the crime.
Current status The suspect was convicted of the crime and sentenced to two years of imprisonment as well as a fine