Chennai woman arrested for hoax bomb emails driven by obsession

A 30-year-old woman named Rene Joshilda, who worked as a senior consultant with an IT firm in Chennai, has been arrested by the Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch. She is accused of sending at least 21 bomb threat emails to places in 12 Indian states, including Gujarat. Some of the places she targeted were schools, the Narendra Modi Cricket Stadium, and BJ Medical College.

Obsessed with colleague, took revenge after his marriage
Joshilda is an electrical engineer and works for Deloitte USI in Chennai. According to police, she was secretly in love with a male colleague who didn’t know about her feelings. She became angry and upset when he got married on February 25 this year. Out of revenge, she sent bomb threat emails using his name or accused him of rape in fake emails.


Harassed other women and made fake documents
Police said her obsession had been going on for two years. She would create fake email accounts to send messages and harass any woman who talked to her male colleague. In one case, she harassed a woman so much that the woman quit her job. Joshilda even created a fake marriage certificate showing that she was married to this colleague and shared it with others in the office.

Used advanced cyber tools
To hide her identity, Joshilda used advanced cyber tools like VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), fake phone numbers, and spoofed email accounts. She is believed to have bought around 80 fake phone numbers and sent hundreds of false messages and emails.

Police said her turning point came when her colleague got married. That’s when she began sending a series of fake bomb threats, trying to frame him and create legal trouble for him.

How she got caught
Although she tried hard to cover her tracks, one small digital mistake helped the police trace her. Police collected digital proof and documents from her devices. She had been sending such emails for over a year before being caught. She was arrested at her home in Chennai.

Her emails caused panic in multiple states, including Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Tamil Nadu. Police say that in many of the threatening emails, she mentioned the name of the male colleague. This helped them link the case back to her.

[With TOI inputs]