The two women lynchpins of the Madhya Pradesh honeytrap scandal tried to blackmail political parties with sleaze videos of veteran politicians for Rs 30 crore during the Lok Sabha elections and even had several rounds of discussions in this regard.
Sources say, the change of government in the state had impacted their established links within parties and they were trying to extract as much money as they could from what they had before the tide turned for the worse.
The Lok Sabha elections they thought was an ideal time when political parties and leaders were looking for dirt on each other and willing to pay through their nose to get it.
A politician even agreed to buy a few videos for Rs 6 crore, but the women were not willing to part with those for anything less than Rs 30 crore.
When they did not find takers for their stock, the women sold some of the videos to individual politicians for a few crore. But by then the police had got a whiff of the racket and had started keeping an eye on their activities.
Following a complaint from Indore city engineer Harbhajan Singh, they arrested five women and a man and have set up a Special Investigation Team in the case.
Though the SIT hasn't made any revelations so far, the probe team sources say it has recovered a large number of mobile phones, laptops and pen drives from them. More than 4,000 video and audio files have also been recovered from the women, who have also revealed names of many powerful men, including politicians and bureaucrats, of whom they have compromising footage of.