Cyber horrors

Internet can be a blessing or curse for lonely people seeking human companionship through it. I have often read about lonely and naïve people falling in the clutches of the most devious people and heading for heartbreak or worse.

There are a few incidents worth sharing from which we can learn lessons. All of them involved people of matured age, no one involved was minor or child, so it can be assumed that we adults can be hoodwinked too, right?

First one I read in newspaper, a young South Indian doctor studying in USA fell in love with his net friend, an exquisite beauty from Hongkong, he fell in love with her so much that he proposed to her and she agreed to marry him, on condition that he will settle down in Hongkong where she was a nurse. Slowly he started to send his earnings to her so she could look for a decent flat and job for him in Hongkong, he drained all his savings and transferred it to her account, then he went to meet her, and found that the 23 year old svelte beauty was an illusion, the actual woman was 48 year old, with a husband and seven children. All the money which he has fished out of from his hard earned salary has been already spent on that hungry family. He sued the lady and returned US broke and heartbroken. The result of the case was yet to be out.

The second one I heard was about two engineering students, lovers, they opened email ids in names of male and female and both used to use these ids together, to fool others, they both used both the ids, sometimes together, some times independently, used each other’s phones and in the process made fun of those who walked into their trap. Their cover was blown when one ardent admirer of the female version, that is the female id they used, insisted on meeting her and landed up in the college, and the guy, exhausted, admitted that he and his lover used to play this game.

The third one is famous all over India, the way the Pakistani cricketer was shown the photograph of one woman and he married some one completely different through phone nikaah. This was an example of too much trust, I think he is the only one person in the whole universe who can have that much blind faith on a net friend. But it showed us the picture too, the tricks net can play.

The fourth one is pretty unsavoury, it was about a group of linked criminal minded educated youth, they used to visit the chat rooms or friendship sites of net, used to sort out lonely people, trap them in their net and rob them off their money by blackmailing them or simply duping them.

They used pseudonyms, and separate ids, they used to befriend each and every victim in a group. Victim never guessed that they are a group but they worked as a group and helped the one their victim fancied most to entrap the victim, by coaxing the victim to fall in love with him or her. And once the victim was in their grip they used to either entrap him or her for blackmailing or for duping. The group was not limited to one single place, they were scattered all over Delhi and surrounding places hence were never caught