Lawyer held for sending vulgar SMSs to women

MUMBAI: A 27-year-old lawyer, Omprakash Dubey, was arrested on Monday for allegedly sending obscene text messages to several women in the city. Dubey used to practise at the metropolitan court in Bandra.

The sleuths recovered as many as 12 sim cards, all of which had been procured using bogus documents, from Dubey. The cops also found two cellphones on the Airoli resident. Dubey, said sources, abused the trust his clients placed in him by using their personal details, like address and date of birth, to procure the sim cards.

Dubey has been booked for forgery, cheating and under provisions of the Information Technology Act. He has been remanded in police custody. for interrogation.

In the last two years, over two dozen complaints pertaining to vulgar SMSs were registered at various police stations in the city. Cops were not able to trace the culprit as Dubey had sent the lewd text messages from the numbers he had procured using bogus documents. In fact, on two occasions, the investigators reached the homes of two people, one in Oshiwara and the other in Malad, while probing the cases. The two men, who had no idea that their details had been used by Dubey to obtain sim cards, were shocked when cops told them that vulgar text messages had been sent from numbers registered in their names. Both the men were detained for questioning.

Dubey would have managed to evade detection by cops had he not used his two handsets to send the SMSs.

Senior inspector of crime branch's unit XI Raghnath Dalvi said, "We started working on the case recently after one of the complainants, Vijay Venuglekar, approached joint commissioner of police Himanshu Roy and sought his help. Venuglekar's daughter had been receiving obscene SMSs from a particular number."

The SMSs were so vulgar that even cops felt offended as they read them. "While the messages were sent using different sim cards, two International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers were common to all the SMSs. We used the IMEI numbers to trace Dubey's location," said Roy.