RANCHI: Move over ‘phishing capital’of India, Jamtara in Jharkhand. It is the eastern swathe of the state bordering West Bengal that has emerged as digital India’s soft underbelly. The newest trend among the ‘cybers’ (locally known as cyber criminals) zip around in luxury cars to avoid detection through mobile phone locations.
While arresting two persons on October 23, from Giridih, about 190 km from state capital Ranchi, the police recovered a database of more than 4 lakh people from the suspects, out of which, one lakh numbers belong to IT professionals, 20,000 bank officials and 10,000 of high-profile businessmen based in south India.
“We received inputs that some suspicious people were trying to withdraw cash from ATM fraudulently. A police team was rushed there and two persons were arrested while the other two managed to escape,” said DSP (headquarters) Sanjay Kumar Rana.
The police found a new trend in cybercrime during the interrogation of the suspects. “These fraudsters move in groups in luxury cars for committing various cybercrimes such as phishing so that their exact location becomes hard to figure out,” said the DSP.
He said Rs 14.66 lakh in cash was recovered from the suspects along with seven costly android mobile phones, six ATM cards, and a large number of SIM cards. The DSP said the scanning of the seized mobile phones revealed evidence of transactions of more than Rs 32 lakh.
The rise in cyber crimes is a veritable headache for the Jharkhand Police. “It is a strange situation: malnutrition and poverty, smartphones have made the world a less unequal place for the youth in the cybercrime hubs of Jamtara and other eastern districts,” said a police officer.
Jharkhand ranked 13th in cybercrime in 2016, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). In 2021, the number of cyber crimes in Jharkhand was 953. The number of cyber crimes in Jharkhand increased from 180 in 2015 to 953 in 2021, growing at an average annual rate of 42.98%.
Mobile phone details also revealed that more than 300 people had already been sent messages related to the “closure” of their SBI bank accounts along with the links, said the DSP. The recovered mobile phones also have credit card details of over 1,000 people in them along with their mail ID, he added.