Kottayam: Kerala Police arrested a 25-year-old man for molesting 68 women in the state. The accused, Pradeesh Kumar, was arrested after a victim lodged a complaint with police.

According to police sources, the accused would befriend women and obtain their contact information. He would then study their behaviour and obtain information regarding their family issues and gain their trust.

If his intended victim was a married woman, Pradeesh would create a fake account and befriend her husband.

Police found out that the accused had multiple Facebook accounts in different names of women. With the fake account, he would chat with the victim’s husband with whom he was trying to establish trust and later take screenshots of the chat and send it to the wives in an effort to make it seem like the prospective victim’s husband was having an extramarital affair. 

Pradeesh would take advantage when the victims would start distancing themselves from their husbands and build a relationship with them. He would video call the women and later use the visuals to morph them with explicit content. He would threaten the women saying, he will send the morphed video to their husbands if they don’t agree to have sexual relations with Pradeesh. 

According to sources, if the victims do not pay heed  to Pradeesh's demands, he would threaten to destroy the reputation of their families by spreading the morphed images and visuals, and would later force the victims to clear their chat history with him.

Kerala Police found morphed images of 58 women in Pradeesh's laptop. Police told media that the accused had informed a victim that she was his 68th victim and that he had set himself a target of 100 women before 2021.