Hello everyone, hope you all doing well! Today I want to share an awful experience with you guys, so you can learn or be aware from it.

So this is story of my friend, who recently got married and all, so kinda in financial crisis. He has taken several personal loans from some well known apps. He has to pay monthly dues. Usually he takes a loan from 1 app and pay the dues of other and some loans with his salary. This time his salary can't help him. As usual he is looking for another online source to get loan. He have to give permissions to that website which is allowing contacts before submitting KYC. Selfie too. As he allowed it before even filling KYC it started showing pay 7000₹ processing fees. As he realised it's a scam, so he logged out from that website/app and uninstalled it too. Quick as lightning he receives message on WhatsApp,'Pay 7000₹'. He denied then that guy started sending audio messages of threats, 'I have your contact list and I will send your naked edited picture to all of your contacts.' As he said he shared with my friend his disastrous art work and contact list. Friend was scared and all. He was agreeing his conditions when he is not in any condition to pay that amount. So he told me about it. I said ,'if you send him money this time , whatever the amount, then from next day 10 more will start blackmailing you. Stop responding him.'  He was feared by his threats, his brain stopped working by overthinking every worst possible output and counters for that. To comfort him I shared few more wise words like , it's a fear game bigger the fear bigger chances of getting money that's what that fraud want. If he shares that picture he will not getting any money from you, so now he is just playing with your fear. It's clearly shows that picture is edited and you are not one who is sharing it. In your defence you say someone hacked my data and trying to blackmailing you. That's it. 

Then he got another idea to get help from cyber security helpline no. 1930. We tried to call them 8-9 times but no response from their side and worst part is it's not even busy it's ringing every time we tried. So we read the reviews of that app from website which you should do before applying for personal loan not after like my friend. There some victims wrote they got blackmailed several times even after payment. Some of them reported to cyber police but police says it's complicated and bigger case we find it difficult to solve, "Hum pta lga rhe h , pta lgte hi aapko bta denge.' (Classic Police Dialogue) and free advice don't fall for these scams. (Like seriously, what if somebody falls for it). Finally we called that guy as a COP and warned him about we are tracking your phone, after that guy said I can talk to you for several hours track whatever you want to track,  then he started abusing us whoever you are tell me your name and police station address I will bomb that place and all. After abusive argument we decided to call 100 and this helpline responded quickly but they suggested us to go to nearby police station report FIR, if you still feel unsafe or harassed by incident we can send someone there or if you having any panic attack or something else then we can arrange ambulance for you. By those words friend got his senses back and stopped responding to that guy. It's been 1 week since no one received any edited picture of him.

While reading reviews we found that too many are victims of this scam. Beware of such activities. If you have to take loan take it from friend or from close relatives. Even during emergency don't forget to read reviews of these apps then and then take personal loans at your own risk. 

Be Safe!