On Thursday (6th November), Gurgaon police arrested a 26-year-old lawyer named Geetika Chawla, her husband, Harsh Kumar Thakkar, and their aide Hanuman in connection with an extortion racket involving false complaints of child sexual abuse.
The trio reportedly targeted men embroiled in marital disputes with the lawyer’s clients by filing fake POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) cases to extort money from them. The police registered the case on 29th October at the Sector 65 police station.
Geetika Chawla, a practicing civil court lawyer in Gurgaon, her husband, and Hanuman, a balloon seller from Ajmer, Rajasthan, were presented before a court on Friday, 7th November. While Thakkar was remanded to five days of police custody, the couple received seven days. Their criminal charges include various serious sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), such as furnishing false information, cheating, forgery, extortion, and criminal conspiracy, along with Section 22 of the POCSO Act for false complaints.
The case had started with a complaint from a man introducing himself as Rohit Kumar, that his eight-year-old son had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by an IT firm owner. However, the Aadhaar card and other documents produced by the complainant were proved to be fake. The police found that the mobile number used was already involved in an extortion case. Hanuman, who impersonated Rohit Kumar, was arrested from Ajmer. He admitted to using a phone, SIM card, and a typed complaint provided by Chawla and Thakkar to file the fake FIR.
During interrogation, Chawla disclosed that she was representing the wife of an IT professional involved in a pending marital dispute and had conspired with her husband and Hanuman to frame her client’s husband in a false rape case to secure financial settlements.
A raid at the couple’s residence in Tata Primanti society, Sector 72 of Gurgaon, uncovered Rs 1.14 crore in cash, gold jewelry worth Rs 2.88 crore, 10 mobile phones, 11 SIM cards, laptops, pen drives, hard disks, passports, and forged Aadhaar cards.
Police revealed that Chawla primarily represented wives in alimony cases and would use Hanuman to file false POCSO complaints against the husbands to pressure them into settlements. Similar cases were previously found false, including incidents in May 2024 and June 2025.
DCP (South) Hitesh Yadav said that more than 30 phones and 100 numbers were scrutinized, out of which many phones were related to Chawla. At least two dozen men have been found to be the victims of this racket and over a dozen others are being investigated for their connections with the accused.
