Inside India’s Largest Illegal Marketplace: The CCTV Porn Racket
What is happening in India right now is not a minor cyber incident, nor some technical glitch that will be patched with an update. It is a full-scale criminal industry built on the theft of intimacy, the sale of stolen bodies, and the commercialisation of people’s most private moments.
A gang of opportunists has discovered that the cheapest, easiest, most profitable business model in this country is to hack weak CCTV systems, extract thousands of hours of footage, and sell it like pornography, turning strangers into products, women into merchandise, and intimate human moments into revenue. That is the truth behind the 50,000 hacked videos circulating across porn sites, Telegram markets, and darknet networks.
This racket simply logged into hospitals, homes, theatres, hotels, schools and offices because institutions across India didn’t even bother changing the default CCTV password from “admin123.”
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That allowed criminals to access delivery rooms, gynaecology wards, couples’ bedrooms, cinema halls, hotel rooms, women’s dressing spaces, and anywhere a CCTV camera sat unprotected. They harvested the footage like digital scavengers, packaging every stolen second as a commodity for resale.
The Gujarat maternity hospital leak is the most chilling example of this new market. Videos of women undergoing gynaecological procedures were quietly pulled from the hospital’s CCTV feed and resold on porn networks for ₹700 to ₹4,000 a clip. Think about that, a woman walks into a hospital expecting care, and instead her body becomes merchandise in an underground marketplace. A single criminal operation accessed more than 80 CCTV dashboards across 20 states and extracted 50,000 clips.
The criminals ran this like a business, teasers on YouTube to attract buyers, Telegram channels for distribution, subscription groups to monetise access, customer funnels, and recurring revenue. They used bots to brute-force passwords. They used multiple tools to extract footage. They used aliases and fake professional identities to infiltrate hospital systems. They knew exactly what they were doing, turning stolen lives into inventory.
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And this is not isolated to hospitals. In Surat, a couple installed CCTV cameras to monitor their child. One camera captured the bedroom. Hackers broke in, stole footage of the wife changing clothes, and circulated it across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Threads. A woman trying to live her life had her naked body turned into viral entertainment because someone realised it could generate clicks, views, and resale value. Police can file BNS and IT Act cases, but no legal section can reverse that violation or erase the footage from the thousands who downloaded it.
The same pattern repeats in the Amroli hotel case, where a woman’s private moments with her partner were recorded without consent, uploaded through her hacked Instagram, and sent to her own relatives and classmates. It is digital sexual violence, delivered through networks that treat a human being’s trauma as content for consumption.
Even cinema halls are not spared. In Kerala, CCTV footage of couples in government-run theatres landed on porn sites and darknet channels. These were not leaked accidentally; someone extracted the files, labelled them as “soft porn,” cut them into saleable clips, and pushed them through monetised groups. Theatres that are supposed to entertain have become raw material for strangers’ arousal. Again, the motive is the same: profit.
Every angle of this epidemic points to the same core truth: India has created the perfect environment for a voyeur-economy to flourish. We have cameras everywhere and security nowhere. Surveillance systems in hospitals, apartments, theatres and schools are installed without the slightest understanding of cyber hygiene. Cloud storages are left exposed. Passwords remain unchanged for years. Access logs are never checked. And into this carelessness steps a class of criminals who understand one thing: there is a paying audience for stolen intimacy, and as long as people can be recorded without consent, someone will be willing to buy it.
The seriousness of this crime cannot be overstated. The group behind this deals in the digital trade of bodies captured without consent. They are powered by the same mindset as offline sexual predators, the belief that a woman’s privacy is disposable, her body is public property, and her dignity can be bought and sold for a few thousand rupees. The only difference is scale. With CCTV exploitation, the victims are not dozens or hundreds; they are tens of thousands, maybe more. Every unprotected CCTV camera in this country is a potential crime scene waiting to be harvested.
So long as this racket stays profitable, it will not stop. As long as some Telegram group pays ₹700 for a stolen clip, someone will hack another camera. As long as men line up online to buy voyeur videos, the supply chain will grow. As long as Indian institutions refuse to take basic cybersecurity seriously, the country will continue feeding a machine that devours privacy and spits out porn.
The people running this racket have shown that they don’t care about laws, ethics, morality, or the catastrophic psychological damage they inflict on their victims. They care about profit. They are businessmen of the lowest order, motivated by the dirtiest currency, the violation of those who had no idea they were being watched.
