No respite from cyber crime in district

Quote:

Easy targets

“People get lured with the help of fake links and messages which are being sent on their mobile phones or social networking sites, which they easily open and get trapped. Elderly persons and first-generation technology users are the most vulnerable as they easily fall for the glib talk of fraudsters.” – A police official

Parveen Arora

Tribune News Service

Karnal, December 27

Even after initiating several steps to spread awareness about cyber crime and frauds, people continue to fall prey to online fraudsters in the district. Even educated people get lured by such tricksters.

As per the data gathered by The Tribune, as many as 161 cases of cyber crime, online fraud and some related to the Information Technology Act had been registered this year till December 14 in the district, which caused a loss of around Rs 1.70 crore to people.

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

Inspector Kavita, SHO, Cyber police station, said apart from online fraud of getting account details, OTP and others, a new type of fraud has become popular. This is luring people on the pretext of lottery ticket which is sent on the Whatsapp number of victim. “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 60-year-old woman of the city.

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of withdrawal of Rs 20,000 a couple of months back and when he contacted the bank, he was shocked that the payment was withdrawn by ATM, but he did not use his ATM.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

Meanwhile, 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. As many as 43 cases had been declared untraced and work on the remaining cases is underway, said the police.

The police claim to 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 about such crime so that they could not fall prey to the fraudsters,” said Ganga Ram Punia, Superintendent of Police (SP).

“On the directions of the police headquarters, we have established a cyber desk in each police station having two police officials in both. These officials have been trained to enhance their capacity to trace cyber crime cases,” said the SP.