Dubai air hostess blackmails man with wife's inappropriate photos, jailed

Dubai - Threatened to circulate photos with her ex-lover unless he paid her $100,000

An air hostess, accused of threatening to circulate a man's wife's compromising photos with her ex-lover unless he paid her $100,000, has been sentenced to three months in jail.
She earlier denied in court the charges of using the Internet to make threats and blackmailing the victim, but the Court of First Instance found her guilty and ordered her deportation at the end of her jail time.
Her accomplice, the wife's alleged ex-lover, is still at large.
Public prosecution records show the 29-year-old Latvian woman blackmailed the complainant that she would send the said photos to his relatives back home if he did not give her the money.
The case was first reported to Bur Dubai police.
The complainant, a 35-year-old salesman from Azerbaijan, said he got a message from the accused on Instagram on December 31 last year.
"She told me that she had something to say about my wife and her ex-lover and that she had photos and proof. She said she wanted to show me what had been going on but she needed 20 minutes of my time."
He felt "angry and sad". "When I talked to her again, she asked for $100,000 for the photos - $10,000 for every photo. I wired $10,000 to her account at a bank when she sent me the first photo."
The husband told the prosecutor that the accused threatened to send the photos to people in his home country if he failed to transfer the money.
The police arrested the accused shortly after the complaint was filed. "She admitted she had opened a fake account on Instagram to blackmail the husband. Her accomplice, a runaway, used to know the complainant's wife. And together, they planned to extort money from the husband and destroy his relationship with his wife," a police lieutenant said.
"She admitted she told the husband she had inappropriate photos of his wife that proved she was cheating on him with her lover (the runaway suspect). She sought money for those photos."
Her accomplice gave her the iPad that contained the photos. She was to give it to the husband for $50,000, the officer added.
The female accused confessed in the investigation she had sent a copy of an email to the husband, in which his wife was complaining of the troubles in their marriage and a photo of her hugging her ex-lover.
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• Dubai