Two students of DPS Bangalore North, one adult held for posting morphed nudes of minor girls

The Bengaluru Police have arrested two minors and one adult for creating and posting online AI-generated nude images of at least two 15-year-old students of the Delhi Public School, Bangalore North.

The parent of one of the victims – a class 9 student – had last week filed a complaint with the city’s Cyber Cell Unit that morphed nudes of her daughter and at least one other girl were circulated on the school’s unofficial Instagram group, which had over 50 members.

After Education Post broke the news on May 25, the school authorities conducted a thorough investigation and identified all the suspects. One of the minors is a classmate of the victims, albeit from a different section. The second is a class 9 student who attends classes at the school only on weekends as part of the National Institute of Open School. And the third suspect, an adult, has been identified as 18-year-old Jeevan Kumar, who hails from Bagalur village situated on the outskirts of Bengaluru.

Two of the suspects, both 15-year-olds, who study at the school were on May 27 suspended indefinitely.

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The two minors have been sent to a juvenile home, while the adult has been sent to jail, a police official investigating the case told Education Post, adding that the trio have been booked under relevant sections of the IT (Information Technology) and the stringent POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Acts. “The suspects were produced in court within 24 hours of their arrest and the court remanded the two minors to a juvenile home and the adult to a maximum of 14 days' judicial custody. But the next date of hearing will likely be some time next week, which is when the court will record the victim's statement,” the official said. 

The victim, whose mother filed the complaint, said that only one of the suspects who attends weekend classes at her school was known to her and was part of her friends group on her private Instagram page.

“I had posted only two absolutely normal selfies on my page. One of those images was extracted and morphed to create my nudes using artificial intelligence,” the 15-year-old told Education Post.

According to the police, the friend who had access to the victim’s Instagram page was coaxed into extracting the girl’s image and sharing it with his friend – the class 9 student of DPS, Bangalore North – who in turn sent the image to Jeevan Kumar.

“It was Jeevan Kumar who created AI-generated nudes of the victims,” the police official said, adding that the morphed images were then sent back to the class 9 student who posted them on the Instagram group.

It is still not clear if the deepfakes of the 15-year-old girls were copied and forwarded to other online groups or websites.

Meanwhile, the victim said that while she was happy that the culprits are being brought to book, she was upset with certain media for publishing lies to sensationalize the matter.

A leading national daily on May 29 published an article quoting an unnamed senior police official and wrote: “The regular class 9 student was the girl’s classmate. Though they were close initially, the girl was irritated by the boy’s advances later and tried to distance herself from him. Upset over the snub, the boy spoke to the student from the open school about it.”

The newspaper quoted the police official as saying: “The latter then told the former to provide a picture of the girl, which was shared with Jeevan, who was a friend of the boy from the open school. Jeevan morphed the photo and the nude images were then posted on social media by the girl’s classmate.”

The victim dismissed this portion of the newspaper report as “completely false and fabricated.”

“I never knew the class 9 student of my school, leave aside being close to him, since he is from a different section altogether. There was no interaction whatsoever. I knew the other guy, who now attends open classes, because he used to attend regular school till last year. But there was no closeness or bad blood as the newspaper report suggests,” the victim clarified, while adding that she had “no idea” why her friend shared her images with random strangers.