Despite spreading awareness, people continue to fall prey to cyber fraud: Cops

Parveen Arora

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Tribune News Service

Karnal, January 7

Even after initiating several steps to spread awareness on cyber crimes and online frauds, people continue to fall prey to the cyber fraudsters in the district, say the police. Even the educated people are lured by them. As per the data gathered by The Tribune, 161 cases of cyber crime, online fraud and of Information Technology Act had been registered last year till December 14 in the district, causing a loss of around Rs 1.70 crore to the victims.

In around 50 cases, people were cheated through Internet banking, account verification, OTP sharing, cloning of ATM and others. Around 30 cases are related to e-wallets as fraudsters cheated people through Google Pay, Paytm, PhonePe.

In a few cases, people have been ‘blackmailed’ by women after luring them to pose naked on-screen video call and later constantly demanding money and threatening to make the videos go viral on social media.

The police say people are lured with the help of fake links, messages which are being sent on their mobile phones or social networking sites, which they easily open and are trapped. Elderly persons and first-generation technology users are the most vulnerable for cyber crime as they easily fall prey to the glib talk of fraudsters, the police official added.

“Apart from online fraud of getting account details, OTP and others, a new type of fraud has become popular and that is luring people on the pretext of lottery ticket which is sent on the Whatsapp number of the victim,” said inspector Kavita, SHO, Cyber police station.

“I got a call that I had won Rs 25 lakh in a lottery ticket and in just 10 minutes, I was made a member of a WhatsApp group which had 180 members. I had been asked to deposit Rs 2 lakh as processing fee, but I immediately quit the group,” said a 60-year-old woman of the city.

Rohit Kumar (name changed), a resident of the city, said he had received a message of a withdrawal of Rs 20,000 couple of months back and when he contacted the bank, he was shocked the payment was withdrawn from an ATM, but he did not use his ATM card. “I was told that someone had cloned his ATM,” he added.

The police claim that they conduct camps to spread awareness, besides establishing cyber desk at the police station level. “We organise camps in schools and colleges to make youngsters aware of such crime, so that they do not fall prey to the fraudsters,” said Ganga Ram Punia, Superintendent of Police (SP).

Tracing percentage low in such cases

The tracing percentage of such cases is very low as only 26 cases had been traced so far, while 18 cases had been cancelled and the trial of four cases is going on in courts. Nearly 43 cases were declared untraced, said the police.

Organising camps for youngsters

We organise camps in schools and colleges to make youngsters aware of such crime. Ganga Ram Punia, Superintendent of Police

Was asked to deposit Rs2L processing fee

I got a call that I had won Rs 25 lakh in a lottery ticket and in just 10 minutes, I was made a member of a WhatsApp group which had 180 members. I had been asked to deposit Rs 2 lakh as processing fee, but I immediately quit the group. — Woman resident, Karnal