The app, named Bulli Bai, was developed in November and hosted on GitHub, an open source software development and hosting platform, as was the earlier app named Sulli Deals. On January 2, the Mumbai cyber police station registered a complaint which named five Twitter handles, namely @bullibai_, @ sage0x11, @hmmaachaniceoki, @jatkhalsa7 and @wannabesigmaf.“Technical analysis of the Twitter handles led us to one of the accused, identified as Kumar Vishal Jha (21), a second year Engineering student in Bengaluru. We then started obtaining details of the followers of the app, which led us to two more accused based in Uttarakhand, identified as Shweta Singh (18) and Mayank Rawat (21),” Mumbai Police Commissioner Hemant Nagrale said.The accused had purposely included words like ‘Jat’ and ‘Khalsa’ in their usernames, in order to give the impression that people from the Sikh community were involved in the offence. They had set up a Twitter handle, named @khalsasupermacist, and entered the user location as Canada. The username had also been changed time and again.Creating an app on GitHub would have been easy for the youth, maintain Mumbai Police sources. “GitHub is an open source platform, which means other users can check the web page or app that you are working on and improve on it with their own suggestions or comments. It is also a platform that is easy enough for anyone with basic knowledge of software engineering to use, and is also openly available for all to use,” explained a police officer.Another officer said that, with knowledge now available at your fingertips, the age of criminals is decreasing, and a significant number of cybercriminals are aged between 18 and 21 years, if not younger.In 2020, the Mumbai Cyber Cell had booked a 17-year-old boy from Thane for allegedly cloning gift cards of a popular coffee shop chain. The accused had learned the art of cloning via the dark web, which he accessed through some Telegram channel. The purpose behind his offence was not sinister though; he simply wanted to be the most popular boy by treating all his friends to coffee and cakes, claimed police sources.The same year, a group of boys, some of them as young as 14, were found to planning how to sexually assault their female classmates in graphic detail in an online group on Instagram. There is, therefore, no surprise at the young age of the culprits.The harassment is nothing new. I have had my photos morphed several times in the past. The government and the police ignored these trends, which emboldened these people and allowed them to get more organised. This exact same modus operandi was followed with the Sulli Deals app last year and nothing happened. That would have given them the courage to make a similar app again,” a victim who was also targeted by the Sulli Deals app, told National Herald.
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