Chennai AI-Morphed Image Harassment of Ex-Colleague (India)

In February 2026, Tamil Nadu's State Cyber Crime Investigation Centre (SCCIC) arrested a woman in Chennai for an AI image-abuse campaign against a former senior colleague.

The case surfaced around January 4, 2026, when multiple employees at a company began receiving follow requests from unknown Instagram accounts. Those fake accounts — set up in the victim's name — circulated defamatory and obscene AI-morphed images of the victim.

Investigators determined that the accused, a former junior colleague, had used AI morphing tools to fabricate the obscene content and deliberately distributed it to the victim's workplace contacts to 'threaten, harass, and publicly humiliate' her over a personal grudge. The SCCIC (under Superintendent of Police, Cyber Crime Wing, Adarsh Pachera) traced the digital footprints, identified and arrested her on February 4, 2026, and she was remanded to judicial custody.

She was charged with cyber harassment, defamation, misuse of social media, and creation and circulation of obscene content. DGP Sandeep Mittal warned publicly that cyber harassment through social media is punishable.

• AI morphing tools used to fabricate obscene images of an identifiable woman from ordinary photographs
• Fake social-media accounts created in the victim's name to distribute the material
• Synthetic content deliberately circulated to the victim's workplace contacts to maximise humiliation

AI morphing tools let the perpetrator fabricate convincing obscene imagery of a former colleague and weaponise it for targeted reputational and psychological harm — circulating it to the victim's professional network and impersonating her via fake accounts.

The documented harm is reputational damage, public humiliation, and psychological distress inflicted through non-consensual AI imagery. This is third-party harm facilitation: the AI user was the offender and the depicted person was the victim.

• Beginning around January 4, 2026, multiple employees received follow requests from unknown Instagram accounts that circulated defamatory and obscene morphed images of the victim.
• The accused, a former junior colleague acting on a personal grudge, used AI tools to morph the victim's photos into obscene content and created fake accounts in the victim's name to threaten, harass, and publicly humiliate her.
• Tamil Nadu's State Cyber Crime Investigation Centre (SCCIC) traced the digital footprints, identified the perpetrator, and arrested her on February 4, 2026; she was remanded to judicial custody.
• Charges: cyber harassment, defamation, misuse of social media, and creation/circulation of obscene content. The DGP issued a public warning on responsible social-media use.