Visakhapatnam: The police here have arrested Bathina Sai Priya, a resident of Hyderabad, for allegedly orchestrating a complex social media scam targeting software engineers.
City police commissioner Shankhabrata Bagchi said here on Wednesday that Priya “created fake Instagram profiles featuring photographs of attractive women. These profiles were then registered on matrimonial websites.”
She then targeted unmarried men, particularly software engineers, initiating online conversations through WhatsApp while posing as the woman in the picture(s). By cultivating emotional links with the men, Priya “fooled them into ‘her’ stories of financial hardships.
A software engineer from Visakhapatnam fell into Priya's scheme and lost Rs 22 lakh. When he sensed that he was cheated, he filed a complaint with the Cyber Crime Police Station. Inspector Bhavani Prasad, leading the cybercrime team, did an investigation.
