Taking it down and getting them caught are two different cases

The first hour

Most of what is lost in these matters is lost on the first evening, by somebody acting on a very understandable instinct: make it go away. Everything below is written for a person who has not slept and does not want to think about procedure.

Why they are two cases and not one

This is the whole argument of the page, so it is worth setting out side by side. Read the two columns as two different files, opened on the same day, going to different buildings.

Notice the last row of the middle column. Removal on its own leaves the account alive. And notice the last row of the right column: a case with good facts and bad evidence goes nowhere. Somebody who does both, on the same day, in the right form, is in a far stronger position than somebody who does one of them three times.

What has actually happened to you

“Cyber crime” is not one thing, and the route depends on which of these you are dealing with. Find your row.

Many people have two or three of these rows at once, which is normal and is worth writing down explicitly, because each row has its own destination and they get separated when the file is handled by different people.

Why the report button did nothing

This deserves a proper explanation rather than a shrug, because the explanation tells you what to do instead.

Section 79 of the Information Technology Act gives an intermediary — a platform that hosts what other people post — protection from liability for that content, on conditions. One of those conditions, Section 79(3)(b), used to be read as meaning that the protection was lost once the platform received any notice about unlawful content. In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, decided on 24 March 2015, the Supreme Court read that provision down: an intermediary is required to act upon receiving actual knowledge from a court order or a notification by the appropriate Government, not upon a private person’s request. The reasoning was about free speech — a platform faced with private complaints would simply remove anything complained of.

So the wall is real and it has a reason. What changed afterwards is that the 2021 Rules built a separate, compulsory grievance mechanism, with named officers, written timelines and an appeal. That mechanism is not the in-app report button, it is not discretionary, and it is the route this page keeps pointing you to.

The Grievance Officer, and the two deadlines

Under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, every intermediary must prominently publish on its website or app the name and contact details of a Grievance Officer and the mechanism by which a user may complain. Rule 3(2)(a) then imposes the timelines: the officer must acknowledge the complaint within twenty-four hours and dispose of it within fifteen days from receipt.

Keep the acknowledgement. Keep the reference number. Note the date you sent it. Most people who tell us the platform ignored them cannot say what day they complained, which makes the next step impossible.

The twenty-four hour rule

Rule 3(2)(b) is the most powerful provision available to an ordinary person in this area and almost nobody knows it is there. It requires an intermediary, on receipt of a complaint by an individual or by a person on their behalf, to take all reasonable and practicable measures to remove or disable access within twenty-four hours to content which:

Two things follow. First, use the words. A complaint that says “this is harassing me” is handled on the fifteen-day track; a complaint that says the content shows the complainant in partial nudity, or is a morphed image in the nature of impersonation, is on the twenty-four hour track. Second, the rule is drafted around the individual concerned, which means a parent, a spouse or an advocate can complain on their behalf — useful when the person affected cannot face doing it.

If the platform says no — the appeal nobody uses

Rule 3A of the same Rules created a Grievance Appellate Committee. A person aggrieved by a decision of an intermediary’s Grievance Officer may appeal to it, and the appeal must be made within thirty days of receiving that decision. It is conducted online.

This exists, it is free, and the overwhelming majority of people who are refused by a platform never use it — they assume refusal is final and turn to a police station for something the police cannot quickly do. Three practical notes. The thirty days run from the decision, so ask for the decision in writing. If the platform simply never replied, say that: non-disposal within the fifteen days is itself the grievance. And keep the appeal as short and as factual as the original complaint.

The cyber crime portal, and what it is for

The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in is the Government’s single intake for complaints of this kind, and it has a distinct track for offences relating to women and children, under which a complaint can be made without the complainant’s identity being made public. It is the right first step for most people and it takes minutes.

Be clear about what it is, though. It is an intake and routing system: a complaint made there reaches the police unit with jurisdiction. It is not an alternative to an FIR where the matter is serious, and it does not itself take content down. Make the portal complaint, keep the acknowledgement number, and treat it as the beginning of the criminal route rather than the whole of it.

The police station, and the two refusals to expect

Where the matter is serious — intimate content, threats, extortion, stalking that is escalating, anything involving a child — an FIR is the step that matters, and two refusals come up so often that it is worth knowing the answer to both before you go.

Go with the complaint already written and printed, with the evidence indexed, and hand it in against an acknowledgement. Ask for a copy of what you filed. Do not argue at the counter; if the complaint is not registered, that is a matter for an advocate and there is a route for it — our page on registering an FIR sets out what to do after a refusal, and it is not repeated here.

The provisions people are usually asking about

Every visitor wants a section number, and giving a confident wrong one is worse than giving none. What follows is the shape of the law, without punishments, because the section that fits your facts is for an advocate or the investigating officer to settle.

Two honest notes about this table. Most real complaints engage several rows at once, and the complaint should describe the conduct fully and leave the sections to the people whose job they are. And a complaint is not weakened by your not knowing the section; it is weakened by a confident wrong one, which is then argued about for a year.

Section 66A does not exist

It is worth a section of its own because it keeps reappearing. Section 66A of the Information Technology Act was struck down in its entirety by the Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal on 24 March 2015, as an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. There is no such offence.

Cases have nonetheless continued to be registered under it, in numbers large enough that the Supreme Court has had to direct that all States and authorities be informed of the position. If you are told your complaint has been registered under Section 66A — or if you are the person complained against and see it in the papers — that is not something to argue about at a counter. It is a reason to put the papers in front of an advocate, and on the receiving side it is a significant point in your favour.

If the person in the content is a child

This is the one category on the page where there is no judgment call and no waiting.

Where material involves a child, reporting it is a legal duty rather than an option: the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act places an obligation on any person who has apprehension that an offence is likely to be committed, or knowledge that one has been committed, to report it, and failure to do so is itself an offence. The Information Technology Act has its own, much more serious provision for material depicting children in sexually explicit conduct.

Capturing evidence so that it survives

A complaint with weak evidence is not a weak case; it is usually no case. And the evidence in these matters is unusually fragile, because it lives on somebody else’s computer and can be deleted by the person who wronged you.

And the negative rule, which is the one people break: do not get it deleted first. A victim who succeeds in having the post removed within an hour, and then goes to the police with nothing but a memory of it, has made the rest of the process far harder than it needed to be.

The certificate that decides whether your screenshots count

This is the most valuable technical point on the page and the one least likely to be mentioned to you before it is too late.

Electronic records are dealt with by Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023. A printout or copy of an electronic record is admissible as a document subject to the conditions of that section, and it must be accompanied by a certificate under Section 63(4) identifying the electronic record, describing the manner of its production, giving the particulars of the device involved and signed by the persons the section requires. This continues the position the Supreme Court settled in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal on 14 July 2020, where it held the certificate to be mandatory for electronic evidence of this kind.

The practical consequence is blunt. A folder of screenshots, however damning, can be worth nothing without the certificate. It is not a formality that gets fixed at the end — who signs it, what device it refers to, and when it was produced all matter, and they get harder to answer with every month that passes. Raise the certificate at the first meeting with your advocate, and ask specifically who will sign it and for which device. If you only take one thing from this page into that meeting, take this.

Preservation — the free step that expires

Everything on a platform is on a clock: content is deleted, accounts are closed, and the records behind them are retained only for a period. The Information Technology Act requires an intermediary to preserve and retain such information as may be specified, for the duration and in the manner prescribed — which means the material exists, for a while, whether or not the account is still visible.

So send a written preservation request as early as you can: to the platform’s grievance channel, naming the account and the content, asking that the account data, the content and the associated logs be preserved pending your complaint and any police investigation. Repeat the request in the police complaint, so that the investigating officer is on notice that it matters. It costs nothing, it takes a paragraph, and it is the difference between an investigation that has material to work with and one that arrives after the records have gone.

When you do not know who it is

Most people in this position feel the case is hopeless, and it is the point at which the criminal route earns its keep. You cannot find out who is behind an account, and you should not try — but an investigating officer can require information from an intermediary, and the intermediary is obliged to provide and to have retained it. That is a power you do not have, cannot hire and cannot buy from anybody offering it.

Three things make that power worth more. Speed, because the records age. A preservation request, because it stops the clock on the material that matters. And precision — the exact handle, the exact URL, the exact dates and times — because a request to a platform is answered against identifiers, not against descriptions.

The route almost nobody uses

Where the content is a photograph or a video that you took, there is a second and quite different lever available: you own the copyright in your own photograph, and platforms operate a copyright complaint process that is generally faster and more mechanical than a harassment complaint, because it is a property claim rather than a judgment about conduct.

Be careful with it and use it honestly. It fits where you are the author of the image. It does not fit where somebody else took the photograph, and it is not a way of removing content you simply dislike. Where it does fit, it can run in parallel with everything else on this page and frequently moves faster. If your work is something you publish — photographs, writing, designs — a formal copyright registration is a separate and unrelated exercise that makes ownership easier to prove later; it is not needed to make a complaint, since copyright exists without registration.

When only a court order will do

Sometimes the grievance route and the appeal both fail, or the same content keeps reappearing on new accounts as fast as it is taken down. That is the point at which a court becomes the answer, and it is worth knowing why it works: because of Shreya Singhal, a court order is precisely the thing an intermediary is required to act on.

Courts have in appropriate cases passed orders directed at content and at its reappearance, and the shape of such an order — what it covers, whom it binds, how reappearances are dealt with — is a matter for an advocate who has done it. What you should take from this section is narrower: the grievance record is what makes that application possible. A petition that can show a dated complaint, a dated refusal or silence, and a dated appeal is a different document from one that says the platform was unhelpful.

If the content is untrue rather than intimate

Where the harm is a false allegation — that you cheated somebody, that you are a fraud, that you did something you did not do — the legal shape changes. That is defamation, it has a civil and a criminal side, and it usually begins with a notice. It is dealt with on our defamation and legal notice page and is deliberately not repeated here.

Two points belong on this page, though. The removal route under the 2021 Rules runs in parallel regardless of which kind of content it is, so the grievance complaint is still worth sending. And the evidence discipline is identical: capture it, date it, preserve it, and get the certificate right. Where a legal notice is the step your advocate settles on, it should go out on a properly captured record, not on a description.

If money has gone as well

Then that part is more urgent than everything else on this page, because the window in which a transfer can be intercepted is short and it closes on its own. Deal with it first, on our online financial fraud page, which sets out the sequence and the reporting route for the money; it is not repeated here.

What belongs here is the overlap: the same account, the same messages and the same screenshots often support both complaints, and they should be captured once, properly, and used twice. Make the two complaints separately — they go to different desks and are worked on by different people — and cross-refer them by their acknowledgement numbers so that neither is treated as a duplicate of the other.

If it is somebody at work

Where the person is a colleague, a manager or a client, there may be a route inside the organisation that moves faster than anything outside it, and where the conduct is sexual in nature the employer is under statutory obligations about receiving and dealing with a complaint. What an employer is required to have in place — the committee, the process, the timelines — is set out on our workplace policy page, which is written from the employer’s side and will tell you what should exist where you work.

That route runs alongside a police complaint and does not replace it, and choosing one does not bar the other. Two practical points: keep the internal complaint and the external one consistent, because inconsistency between them is the first thing that gets attacked; and do not use the employer’s devices or accounts to gather evidence about a colleague, because who owns the device becomes a question of its own.

If it is a former partner or a spouse

A very large share of this conduct comes from somebody who was once close, and that changes the options by adding to them rather than by narrowing them. Conduct of this kind by a person in a domestic relationship can also be addressed under the protection law, where an order restraining contact and communication is one of the reliefs available; our domestic violence page sets out that framework.

Three cautions specific to this situation. Threatening to publish private content in order to obtain something — money, a withdrawal, a reconciliation — is extortion, and it should be reported as such rather than negotiated with. Do not agree to meet to “sort it out” and do not delete the messages in which the demand was made. And where children are involved, keep them entirely out of it — our custody page explains why involving a child is the most damaging thing a parent can do to their own position.

If it involves a school or a college

Where the people involved are students, there is usually an institutional route as well as a legal one, and it is often quicker: an anti-ragging or grievance mechanism, a warden, a head of department, a written complaint to the institution. Where the person affected is a minor, everything in the section above about content involving a child applies and applies immediately.

What parents should avoid is the instinct to handle it entirely inside the institution in order to keep it quiet. The institution can discipline a student; it cannot preserve data, it cannot require information from a platform and it cannot deal with an account outside its walls. Use both routes, and put the complaint to the institution in writing so that the dates exist. Our school dispute page explains what a school is and is not obliged to do, and where the regulator’s power runs out.

The second fraud — people who sell removal

Victims of this kind of harm are targeted a second time with remarkable reliability, and the pitch is always the same: we have a contact at the platform, we can get it deleted, we can get the case closed, pay now because it spreads by the hour.

What not to do

One paragraph that is not about procedure

The commonest reason a complaint is made late is not ignorance of the law. It is shame — particularly where the content was shared privately, and by somebody who was trusted. It is worth saying plainly: sharing something in confidence does not make its publication your fault, consent to take an image is not consent to publish it, and the twenty-four hour rule exists precisely because the law treats this as a serious wrong done to you.

The practical part of that is simple. Tell one person you trust before you deal with the paperwork, because doing this alone is what makes people give up halfway. The complaint about offences relating to women and children can be made without your identity being made public. And if this is weighing on you more than you can carry, treat that as a reason to talk to somebody — a family member, a friend, a doctor or a counsellor — rather than as something to get through by yourself.

Where these go wrong

Being realistic about outcomes

Two honest things, neither of which helps us sell anything.

Removal usually works, and it usually does not end the problem. Content reappears, accounts are made again, and the same material surfaces elsewhere. That is not a sign the process failed; it is the reason the criminal route and, in a persistent case, a court order exist. Plan for a second round rather than being defeated by it, and keep the record building — each dated complaint makes the next step stronger.

The criminal route is slower than anybody wants and its pace is not something an advocate can promise away. What can be influenced is the quality of what it starts with: complaints made early, evidence captured whole, preservation requested, the certificate in order. A matter that begins well is a different matter from one that begins with a description of deleted content. Almost everything on this page is about the first week, because that is the part that is still in your hands.

What to have ready before anybody drafts

Your dated list of what happened, in order. The captures — full-screen, with URL, handle and timestamp — and the originals, unedited, backed up. The exact identifiers: profile URLs, handles, phone numbers, email addresses. The grievance complaint you sent, its acknowledgement and any reply, with dates. The portal acknowledgement number if you have made that complaint. A copy of anything handed in at a police station, with the acknowledgement. Your own identity and address proof. And, where the content was originally created by or with you, whatever shows that — the original file, its properties, the device.

Parts of that set have to be put on oath, so build the visit to an oath commissioner into your plan at the start. The affidavit is habitually the last item anybody thinks about and the first the counter refuses a file without. Collect a certified copy of each order while it is fresh rather than in one trip a year later; put anything in another language through translation before it is annexed; and when an office has gone quiet about what it did with your complaint, an RTI application is often the shortest way to make it answer.

Our part in a matter like this

Documents, and nothing beyond them. Nobody here is an advocate, nobody appears before any court, nobody speaks to a police station or a platform on your behalf, and nobody here can get content removed or anybody arrested — there is no such service, and the people who claim to sell it are the second fraud described above. What we do is the cyber crime complaint and the police complaint written properly and in order, the grievance complaint and the appeal representation set out against the rule they rely on, the evidence index, the affidavits and their attestation, the legal notice where your advocate settles that one is needed, the petition and applications typed to your advocate’s instructions, the reply where something has been filed against you, certified copies, translations, and the appeal papers later on.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. The directory is free to open and free to write through, it runs A to Z, and no listing on it was bought.

What we decline in a matter like this

If you cannot afford an advocate

Say so, early, to whoever you are speaking to. The Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987 provides representation at the State’s cost for people who cannot meet it themselves, and a person who has been targeted in the way this page describes falls well inside what that scheme was written for. Who qualifies is worked out against categories and an income ceiling that the authority revises, which is why no figure appears here — put the question to the legal services desk at the court complex and get the answer that is current.

And the part that costs nothing at all: the grievance complaint, the preservation request and the portal complaint are free, they are the three most time-sensitive steps, and none of them needs an advocate to be sent. Do those first, whatever else you can or cannot afford.

What we charge, said up front

Open any service page and that document’s price is on it, before you order and before you speak to anybody. Anything payable to a court or a government office is shown apart from our figure, because it is not our money.

You hear the whole figure before work begins and nothing is taken in advance. And on this page the useful thing is not the price but the order of doing things: capture the evidence and send the grievance complaint with a preservation request today, free, before you commission anything from anybody. Then tell us what you sent and when, because the drafting that follows is built on those dates. If the content involves a child, do not wait for documents at all — report it now.