Several bureaucrats, journalists, NGOs, and eight former Madhya Pradesh ministers seemed to have caught in a sophisticated form of honeytrap and extortion racket busted by the Special Investigation Team in Madhya Pradesh.

The kingpin of the racket Shweta Jain confessed to SIT that she used to coax young girls from lower-middle-class families with a promise of posh lifestyle and studies at prestigious colleges in exchange of sleeping with high profile VIPs. The investigation was conducted after a victim reported blackmailing from one of the girls.

Shweta later admitted that the main target of the honeytrap was to get lucrative government projects scaling in several hundred crores which would then be given to different companies by her and her assistant Arti Dayal on commission bases. Some of the IAS/IPS officers are also in the soup as they have contacted Shweta to get on top of the line assignment by luring their seniors with a young company. Shweta would coerce several colleges going girls from indigent background to sleep with a way to older men on demand of VIPs. During the interrogation in Indore, she admitted that with a persistence persuading, and luxurious stay, she brainwashed many girls to slip into the honeytrap racket.

During the interrogation, Shweta was confronted with an 18-year-old college-going girl, Monica Yadav. She told SIT that she came into contact with Shweta seeking admission in one of the renowned colleges of Indore. Monica was told to sleep with a 60-year-old bureaucrat in return. Before the offer was presented to Monica, Arti Dayal accompanied her from Indore to Bhopal for meeting three secretary-level IAS officers in Audi. After Monica refused, to sleep with the IAS officer, both Arti and Shweta tried to persuade Monica and her father to send her to Bhopal if they want their NGO to support her in studies. Once she agreed to that Arti made an MMS threatened her to upload the video on the website if she told anything to her parents, while Shweta used the same MMS to extort Rs 3 crore from the bureaucrat.

Moreover, the names of many Bhopal-based media person are emerging in this high-profile honeytrap racket. A cameraman of a news channel, an editor of a Hindi newspaper, and an owner of a regional TV channel are allegedly having a significant contribution in the operation of the racket. K. K. Mishra, the spokesperson of the ruling Congress, gave stress on the arrest of all the involved journalist as soon as proper evidence is gathered by the SIT.

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