A Gurugram man has been arrested for allegedly conning a 21-year-old student of Rs 24.60 lakh, and he told police the whole scheme was lifted straight off a web series.

The accused, identified as Alok K, was picked up on September 11 after a Mumbai student filed a complaint at the Bangur Nagar police station, according to a Times of India report carried by Bollywood Hungama. Once in custody, Alok reportedly told investigators he had taken his cue from the antagonist Vikrant Massey plays in Pritam And Pedro, the show produced by Rajkumar Hirani and led by his son Vir Hirani alongside Arshad Warsi and Massey.

Here's the setup, per the report. Alok posed as a student counsellor and met the victim, who was enrolled in a distance-learning MBA finance programme with a management institute, at a Juhu cafe earlier this year. He helped the student sort his admission paperwork, and that's how the trust got built.

Months later, the student was sitting an online exam when his screen flashed a cheating alert. He rang Alok to say he hadn't copied. The same alert showed up on the exam's last day, and this time the application crashed altogether.

"Alok called up the student and inquired whether he had been copying again," the Times of India report states. The student denied it again, but Alok allegedly warned him that he'd be debarred and blacklisted, unable to get into any other university ever again. He offered to fix things, for a price, and promised a refund if he couldn't deliver.

The student paid up in installments, Rs 24.60 lakh in total. He got back just Rs 1.15 lakh. And here's the twist, he passed the exam anyway, yet the demands for money kept coming. That's when it clicked that he'd been had. He told his parents, and the complaint followed.

Police traced Alok through his phone records and the money trail, tracking him to Gurugram. Investigators say he'd previously worked at a call centre contracted by the management institute for admissions and counselling, which is how he got hold of the victim's number from the centre's database in the first place. Two phones have been seized from him.

The irony hasn't been lost on anyone. Pritam And Pedro built its reputation partly on a message about cybercrime awareness, and Bollywood Hungama notes the show became India's most-watched web series of 2026 with 23 million viewers. One of its viewers, apparently, took the wrong lesson from it.

The case is still with the police, and it isn't clear yet what charges will be filed or when. Alok's version of events, and how directly the show shaped his plan, will presumably get tested as the investigation moves forward.