Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Thursday claimed to have arrested a suspect from Karachi who allegedly lured widowed and divorced women for marriage through social media and then blackmailed them to extort large sums of money.

The deputy director of FIA's Cyber Crime Wing, Abdul Ghaffar, said the agency received a complaint from a woman on December 3 and after holding an inquiry, arrested the suspect.

The suspect has been charged with Section 14 (electronic fraud), 21 (offences against modesty of a natural person and minor), and 24 (cyberstalking) of The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016.

The held suspect had also identified himself as an official of a "fake" agency, revealed the official.

During FIA's investigation, it transpired that the suspect created multiple online identities, one of which was a Facebook ID by the name of "Wajdan Ali". He sent messages in bulk on Facebook messenger claiming that he is a "well-wisher of widows" and is interested to marry them.

According to the complainant, the suspect asked her to meet him and expressed his desire to marry her. Upon meeting the suspect, the woman was shown "fatwas (religious decrees)" and the two performed a nikah without a Nikah Khwan (marriage officiator).

After having performed the "nikah", the suspect told her: "We have to keep our nikah a secret."

A few days later the complainant received a call from an unknown number and the caller told her that he was in possession of an "objectionable" video of her and if she wanted to get the video deleted then she should pay Rs200,000, the FIA official revealed while sharing details of the preliminary investigation.

The cybercrime official said that the complainant in her statement before the investigation agency disclosed that the held suspect made videos of her and then blackmailed her.

Due to the compromising nature of the video, the complainant paid him a sum of Rs30,000 through Easypaisa on December 8, as the "first installment".

The official explained that the modus operandi of the suspect was that he showed himself as an official of "Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)", which is a fake agency, and used to tell women that he could not declare the marriage public because the “agency personnel” would take him and her (his wife) to task in case their marriage was made public.

“He would lure women to chat with him on virtual American numbers which he would generate using an application on the internet,” said the cybercrime wing official.

Ghaffar said the suspect had assumed that such numbers were not traceable and would change numbers intermittently and ask girls to chat over Whatsapp as "Facebook is not secure".

“He [the suspect] would then insist to meet these women at a 'hotel' in Clifton near Do Talwar, where he would record their videos with the help of hidden cameras,” disclosed Ghaffar.

“He would then use the videos to blackmail the women and extort large sums of money,” added the official.

He said the suspect has extracted Rs0.6 million from one woman and Rs30,000 from another after recording their videos.

The suspect is a matriculate and resident of New Karachi who appeared to have gained "expertise" in use of modern technology. The FIA was also probing the role of the hotel, said the senior official.