Itanagar: The Special Investigation Team (Crime) of the Arunachal Pradesh police has arrested one Avinash Verma, a budding TV actor, for running a pornography website.
Verma (37), seen in several TV serials such as Savdhaan India, Sansani and Krishan Kanhaiya among others, was arrested by the Arunachal Pradesh police from Noida in Uttar Pradesh on September 19, police said.
Addressing a news conference at the police headquarters here, SIT (Crime) superintendent of police Rohit Rajbir Singh said, “Verma, who is also a certified fitness trainer, was arrested by the state police following a complaint filed by an Itanagar-based complainant against a pornography website titled ‘Desimasalaboard.org.”
The website has around 1 lakh subscribers.
According to the complainant, some morphed images of his cousin were uploaded in the said website by one of the users (username Godfather) and most of the pictures were taken from the victim’s Instagram account.
This, the police said, had caused unbearable mental trauma to the victim.
“Accordingly a case under section 292(2)(a)/509 of the IPC read with Section 6 of Indecent Representation of Women (prohibition) Act, read with Section 67(A) of IT Act was registered and an investigation was taken up by the SIT team,” SP Singh said.
The SP said following investigation, the SIT team found that the profile named Godfather was the moderator/admin of the aforementioned website.
“The police accordingly tried to contact the owner of the website through email, but he refused to cooperate. Subsequently, the SIT, along with the cyber experts, used advanced digital evidence collection techniques and managed to ascertain the phone number of the accused and then his location,” Singh said.
The SP said an SIT team led by inspector Chapang Lowang and consisting of sub-inspector Wokim Mungray and constables G L Ray and Sanjeev Kumar then reached the National Capital Region (NCR) and eventually arrested Verma from his Nodia house.
During interrogation, Verma revealed that he was the owner of the website and also the super moderator named ‘Godfather’ who had uploaded the content. He had been running this website as its sole owner since 2018. The morphed photographs of our victim were uploaded in January 2019, the SP said.
Giving more details of the website, Singh said it has access to different pornographic contents such as images of nude girls, MMS, pornographic videos, etc.
“The website which has 6 moderators charges users a certain amount for full access while premium and platinum members can also download and upload videos on it,” Singh said while adding that the site would be brought down soon.
Besides running the website, Verma was also earning money by hosting advertisements on it from websites such as juicyads etc.
He was receiving payments for the adverts in the form of crypto currency and was easily earning Rs 50,000 a month doing all this from his home, the SP said.
Verma who was brought to Itanagar on a transit remand on Wednesday is presently under police custody.
