Riya: Cell shock

Mumbai, July 22: City police have arrested members of a gang which allegedly morphed porn films and converted them into video clips for circulation as MMS on mobile phones.

The arrests come days after actor Mallika Sherawat had complained to the police about an MMS showing a look-alike in a sexual act with a white man. The clip was widely circulated on MMS-enabled mobile phones across the country. It later turned out that it featured a Spanish porn actor, Lolly, who bears a striking resemblance to Sherawat.

Another smut clip, purportedly showing Moon Moon Sen’s model daughter Riya Sen and former boyfriend Ashmit Patel, has been in circulation among mobile users for the last few months. Mumbai film and modelling circles have expressed outrage at this latest tech rage.

The deputy commissioner of police (zone II), Pratap Dighavkar, would neither confirm nor deny whether the gang had played any role in the creation of the MMS involving the two starlets.

“We are still investigating how long the racket was in operation, where they acquired the expensive technology, and how many people are involved in this. I would not like to give details at this juncture,” Dighavkar said.

Following a tip-off, the police raided a shop, Ramesh & Co, on the ground floor of Parvati Mansion at Lamington Road, central Mumbai, last evening. They found a 21-year-old man viewing a porn film video on his cellphone.

The police seized a central processing unit containing a library of pornographic films, a Nokia mobile phone with MMS and wireless Blue Tooth technology, a compact disc containing Nokia software, 13 memory sticks, DVDs and 12 video CDs.

Based on information given by Ashish Gurjar, the 21-year-old accused, the police today arrested Ramesh Jain, 43, and Manoj Jain, 27. All three have been charged under Sections 292 (sale of obscene material) and 67 (publishing, storing, recording, circulating lascivious material) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Gurjar is believed to be the technical expert and the Jains the lynchpins of the racket.

The police are looking for an alleged associate, Gaurang Shah, 30.

“The gang acquired original pornographic films and morphed the faces of actors in the films with well-known Indian and foreign personalities,” deputy commissioner Dighavkar said.

“These morphed clips were converted into an MMS using the wireless Blue Tooth and Infrared technology and sold. They also transferred the clips to memory sticks in their customers’ phones using a recorder via USB port (a data transfer facility).”

Memory sticks are inch-long chips that can store data and enhance the memory of a mobile phone.

“The sticks have a capacity of up to 260 megabyte and can store up to 15 to 20 minutes of film footage,” Dighavkar said. “The morphed porn movie clips were of six to eight minute duration.”

The officer refused to reveal either the identities of celebrities whose faces were morphed by the group, or the background of the trio.

Lamington Road, the area where the raid was conducted, houses Mumbai’s biggest pirated computer materials market.

“One MMS can be transferred to 10,000 phones very fast,” said senior inspector I.M. Zahid, who heads the cyber crime cell of the Mumbai police.

“The gang used Codec, which encrypts and compresses large audio-video files and occupies less space on storage devices like hard discs, memory discs and thumb drives.”