A young lawyer, her husband, and a balloon seller were arrested on Thursday for allegedly running a racket that framed men entangled in marital disputes in false rape cases to extort money from them, Gurugram police said on Friday.
The accused were identified as Geetika Chawla, 26, a lawyer practising at the Gurugram civil courts, her husband Harsh Kumar Thakkar, 29, and Hanuman, 35, also known as Rohit, who sold balloons on city footpaths. Police said the trio allegedly extorted ₹1.14 crore in cash, along with gold ornaments, coins worth around ₹2.85 crore, from their victims.
During a 16-hour search of their flat in Tata Primanti, an upscale complex in Sector 72, police also recovered 10 mobile phones and 11 SIM cards allegedly used to make extortion calls , laptops, several passports and Aadhaar cards. Police said Chawla’s prime targets were the husbands of her clients who approached her for seeking legal help in form of alimony and maintenance.
The racket was busted after Hanuman, posing as Rohit Kumar using a forged Aadhaar card, lodged an FIR at Sector 65 police station on October 29, alleging that his minor son, who sold balloons with him, had been kidnapped and raped by a car owner who passed by the route where he sold balloons.
Deputy commissioner of police (south) Hitesh Yadav said the man named in the complaint was a Gurugram-based IT firm owner had briefly travelled on the route mentioned in the FIR while visiting his parents. “We found that the complainant’s number had been used earlier in an extortion complaint. That raised doubts,” Yadav said.
Investigators called Rohit Kumar for verification and discovered that the photograph on the Aadhaar card used in the FIR did not match the one he later submitted as it was a forged one provided to him by Chawla. “After sustained questioning and counselling of the child, it emerged that Hanuman had filed the complaint at the directions of a lawyer and her husband. His details, when fed in a central repository of the crime database, revealed that he was an accused in a theft case registered in Gurugram in 2011,” Yadav said.
When Chawla and Thakkar were questioned, she admitted to representing the IT professional’s wife in an ongoing marital case. Police said the couple had plotted to frame him in a false rape case to force a financial settlement for the wife.
The investigation revealed that this was not an isolated incident. In May 2024, Chawla allegedly persuaded another client, also locked in a dispute with her husband, to accuse him of sexually assaulting their minor daughter. That case, registered at the Women’s Police Station (West), was later found to be false.
In June this year, Hanuman’s wife filed a similar rape case in Faridabad against another man, also at Chawla’s behest. Police said both complaints mirrored the same pattern and were ultimately declared false.
“The details were strikingly similar to the recent Sector 65 FIR that exposed the nexus,” a senior investigator said. “Cops who handled the two previous cases had no idea then that these were connected or part of a larger extortion racket.”
DCP Yadav said multiple men involved in legal disputes with their wives had reported receiving extortion calls over the past year. “We examined records of over 30 mobile phones and 100 numbers. Many were linked to Chawla’s devices,” he said.
Police believe at least two dozen men may have been targeted by the group. “We suspect the seized gold and cash are proceeds from these extortions,” an officer said.
Yadav added that a dozen more people connected to the couple are under investigation for helping identify targets and filing fabricated complaints.
A special investigation team led by ACP (Badshahpur) Surender Phogat has been formed to probe the case. Police said data recovered from Chawla’s laptop included the draft of the FIR filed by Hanuman at Sector 65 police station.
Investigators said Chawla, who earned her law degree from a university in Meerut in 2022, often made Hanuman write complaints in his own handwriting to avoid arousing suspicion.
Hanuman, a balloon seller from Ajmer, is currently on a five-day police remand. It was Thakkar who had found him near Bhuteshwar temple in Sector-11 in 2022 and kept him in loop to exploit his financial condition. Chawla and Thakkar have been remanded in police custody for seven days to determine how many fake cases were filed and how much money was extorted.
“The extent of the racket is still being uncovered,” said DCP Yadav. “We are tracing other individuals and victims linked to their network.”