THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In an indication of the wide net that cyber financial criminals have cast, the cyber division of the state police took down about 18,000 websites and 12,000 social media accounts involved in malicious activities in the last one year.
Highly-placed sources said investigators removed 18,609 websites and 11,948 social media accounts from the cyberspace after serving notices to the domain registrar and social media platforms, respectively.
An official involved in the operations said, “Fake e-commerce sites, websites that ran trading and job scams and sites that hosted malicious apps were among those that were taken down.”
Cyber fraudsters swindled a whopping Rs 635 crore from Keralites until October 28 this year, which is three times the amount from last year. With two more months left, the figure is expected to touch Rs 800 crore this year. Despite their best efforts, enforcement authorities could retrieve only about Rs 87.5 crore of the total money lost.
In all, nearly one lakh incidents of cyber financial fraud came to light in the state this year, while around 32,000 cases were registered. In about 3,050 cases, the amount swindled exceeded Rs 1 lakh. An analysis done by the police had revealed that most victims fell for trading scams (1,157), followed by job scams (1,002) and courier scams (211).
Victim profiling done in cases where the amount lost was over Rs 1 lakh revealed that private employees (613), homemakers (338), businesspersons (319), NRIs (224), IT professionals (218), doctors (115), defence personnel (53), engineers (46), farmers (21) and priests (8) were among those conned.