The Mumbai Police on Thursday arrested a man from Delhi in connection with a dating app scam exposed two months ago. 26-year-old Ankur Meena is allegedly the mastermind of the scam involving young women trapping men through dating apps and then making them pay large amounts of money in bills in pubs and clubs. Meena also goes by the monikers Happy and Meena Defaulter.
A team of Bangur Nagar police was stationed in Delhi for the last several days after tracing Meena to Delhi and arrested him from a hotel in a joint operation with Delhi’s Anand Vihar police. After the scam was exposed by an operation by Mid-Day, Ankur Meena left his home and took refuge in Delhi hotels, frequently changing his location.
As per the police, he was still running the scam from hotels in Delhi, targeting nightclubs in Delhi and surrounding areas. The police scanned most of the hotels, including 3 and 4 star hotels, in the Shahdara locality, and succeeded in catching him on Thursday from IP Royal Hotel in Anand Vihar. An official from Bangur Nagar police said that the police team received precise information about Meena’s location, and nabbed him.
Notably, Meena had issued a challenge to the police to arrest him, boasting that no one could catch him. However, at last, he has been arrested.
Police said that although he is not cooperating with the investigation, he has provided names of some clubs in Mumbai involved in the scam. “We are trying to find out which clubs in Mumbai, Pune and Thane were involved in the scam and the names of every racketeer,” said an officer.
As per a report by Mid-Day, Ankur Meena is from a respectable family residing at Sushila Garden in Delhi’s Saboli Extension. His father is a school principal and his brother is a dentist, and they were apparently unaware of his criminal activities. Reportedly, Meena came across people who scammed men through dating apps, and started emulating them.
According to the police, after successfully running his dating app scam in cities such as Delhi, Goa, Jaipur, Dehradun, Agra, Lucknow, Bhopal, Jabalpur, Raipur, and Nagpur, Meena expanded his operations to Mumbai, Pune and Thane. He was working in Mumbai for around two years.
Ankur Meena hired attractive young women to trap wealthy men and hired young men who worked as PR agents. He then used the PR agents to lure the owners of nightclubs, pubs, bars, lounges and restaurants to take part in the scam. Establishments impacted by the pandemic were especially targeted. The gang got the pub owners to agree with the deal by promising rapid growth of business and high profits. After the deal was finalised by Ankur Meena, his key associates including Pratham (using aliases Chandu and Praveen) managed day-to-day operations.
The women, aged between 18 and 27, registered themselves on dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Happn and QuackQuack, and contacted men looking for companions on such apps. Most men in the targeted areas get a large number of matches within 24 hours of opening their accounts, and the women who match with them request a date at one of the pubs or restaurants part of the deal.
When they meet their targets at the establishments, the women order expensive drinks and other items, often taking the bill to ₹40,000 to ₹70,000 or even one lakh in just half an hour. At the time of the bill payment, the woman flees from the restaurant under some pretext with the help of the management, forcing the man to pay the entire amount. The women got 25%-30% as a cut from the bill.
The restaurants use all means to make the men pay, intimidating them with serious consequences and using bouncers to assault those who refuse to pay.
The scam was exposed in August this year after Mid-Day sent some reporters posing as men looking for dates on dating apps and published a report based on the findings. After receiving complaints on the scam from readers, the publication in July got its correspondences to open accounts in dating apps. Within 24 hours of opening, they received a large number of matches, with women offering to meet them at pubs and clubs.
In every incident where the reporters arrived for the date, the women ran up hefty bills by ordering expensive drinks in a short period of time, a then fled using some excuse. The reporters also saw the same women going back to the same establishment with a different man after some time.
The clubs and pubs involved in the scam made payments to Ankur Meena, who made payments to women and others involved in the operation.
After Mid-Day published the report, Amboli police registered a case of cheating against unknown individuals based on complaints by victims. But initially there was no progress in the case. A month later, a victim filed a similar complaint at Bangur Nagar police station, alleging that he was were scammed by the gang at Godfather Club in Andheri. When the man could not pay the large amount of bill, Pratham escorted him out to a an ATM and made him withdraw money.
The police booked the club owner, the women involved and others involved in the scam under the charges of cheating, extortion, and conspiracy. Based on the investigation, the police raided a hotel in Goregaon and nabbed six people including two women. Phones recovered during the raid revealed the scale of the racket. The racket and the probe also identified Ankur Meena as the kingpin of the racket.
