3 Youths Flee Home, Distressed Families Seek Police Help in Punjab’s Khanna
Two of them are college students who were frustrated by their parents’ repeated scolding over wasting time on online gaming
25 August, 2026 – Ludhiana : The Khanna police have solved a rather unusual case after families of three youths turned to them for help.
It so happened that three friends from Ludhiana and Machhiwara Sahib suddenly vanished, leaving their families worried. It was only after considerable investigation that the police found that it was their obsession with an online battleground game, Free Fire, that had prompted the youths to leave home, particularly to escape their parents who had been scolding them for “wasting their time”.
The trio had actually travelled out of Punjab to meet their online friends without informing their parents. Unable to trace them, the distressed parents approached the Khanna police and lodged missing-person reports.
While two of the youths, both aged around 22, are college students, the third is a migrant labourer from Ludhiana who was also their friend.
Based on their digital footprints, the Khanna police finally traced the youths to Rajasthan. They shared the youths’ exact location with the Rajasthan Police, who finally found the trio.
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The recovered youths have been identified as students Utkarsh and Varun Kumar, both residents of Machhiwara Sahib, and migrant worker Mohit of Gill Road, Ludhiana.
Senior Superintendent of Police, Khanna, Darpan Ahluwalia told The Tribune that on August 20, Varun had taken a car from his house and left for Jaipur, Rajasthan, with his friends Utkarsh and Mohit Kumar. All three had then switched off their mobile phones, which put their families under undue stress, the police said.
“After the Khanna police received a complaint about them, our technical team was immediately put to work. The police managed to trace the footprints of their Gmail IDs, through which their exact location was found in Rajasthan. The Khanna police immediately contacted the Rajasthan Police and shared the location of the youths with them. The Rajasthan Police conducted a raid and found all three at the house of their Rajasthan-based friend identified as Shikhar,” claimed SSP Ahluwalia.
Asked how the police managed to trace them, the SSP revealed that CDR analysis followed by an IMEI search revealed one number whose OSINT also showed a DP for the online game, which confirmed that the boy was using it. Gmail also provided the IMEI number, which matched with this. Further correspondence with Gmail also helped the police a lot.
The SSP said preliminary questioning of the youths revealed that they had run away to Rajasthan to escape their parents, who had been discouraging them from playing Free Fire.
“Free Fire is our first priority, we cannot stop playing it. We wanted to meet our Free Fire friends across the country. We had also planned to visit Haridwar and Kedarnath along with our online gaming friends as part of our Free Fire journey,” one of the boys told the police.
SSP Ahluwalia revealed that after the trio were traced, a team of Khanna police was immediately dispatched to Rajasthan to bring back the youths.
Sources said that online gaming sometimes also exploited youths for radicalisation and recruitment for nefarious designs.
The Tribune