District police HQs in Telangana not equipped to deal with cyber crimes

HYDERABAD: Thirty-eight-year-old N Ramesh from Warangal has been vexed with his smart phone for several months now. A realtor by profession, he is obliged to attend to dozens of calls everyday from his clients. However, over the last three to four months, he has been flooded with spam calls. He has been receiving voice over internet protocol (VOIP) calls from random numbers.   The callers lure him with different offers stating that he has won a lucky draw or he has been chosen for a premium credit card and ask him to deposit money into a certain bank account and also ask for debit/credit card details and numbers.

Even after installing apps to block such calls, he continued to receive them. At one such instance, falling prey to the fraud, Ramesh lost Rs 10,000 which he deposited into an unknown bank account. Reaching out to the local police, Dharmasagar police station in Warangal, police refused to register his case and suggested he approach the Cyber Crime wing of the Central Crime Station in Hyderabad, saying that they lacked the requisite equipment at the district headquarters to deal with such cases.

Cyber crimes are not restricted to the capital city anymore and, of late, victims across the state have been reaching out to the cyber crime wing of the state CID and the frequency of incidence is only going up. The reason: leave alone rural police stations, even district police headquarters do not have any standard operating procedures for dealing with cyber frauds.

Confirming that the CID has been receiving several complaints from rural areas, CID superintendent of police (cyber crimes) U Ram Mohan said that there was no such equipment or technologies to resolve the Internet call cases.

“Once the IP address of a caller is obtained, the call can be traced to either a SIM card, a Modem or a Data Card. Such an elaborate procedure has to be followed to solve such a crime. But in districts, there is no such technology to know the information and they don’t have the equipment to detect the crime,” he said.
The VOIP caller ID is nothing but calling from one particular number and displaying a totally different number to the receiver of the call. Caller ID spoofing is based on the technique of VOIP calls.  “These are not telephone calls but Internet calls. The caller identity is the process of changing the caller ID numbers,” explained Ram Mohan.  Ramesh told Express that he had been receiving dozens of calls from different numbers everyday.