VISAKHAPATNAM : Though the government is promoting cashless transactions, people are wary of doing digital modes of payment. Being the financial capital of the state, Visakhapatnam has registered 400 cyber crime cases this year. But not even a single case has been cracked till now.
Among the 400 cases, 226 belong to the Net Banking frauds (Phishing and Vishing). Police said that almost all are One Time Password cases (Vishing). The victims reveal the confidential details of their ATM cards to the criminals who contact them over phone and introduce themselves as bank authorities.
Besides vishing, as many as 111 cases belong to online frauds, job frauds and duping. The victims in these cases include Navy officials, Steel Plant employees, Railway employees, teachers, bank employees, businessmen and a few other classes of people. Crores of rupees have been lost.
As the criminals turn increasingly tech-savvy and come up with new ways of duping people, cyber crime police in the investigation cell in Vizag are on their toes on how to solve cases and tackle them. Lack of coordination among police officials is allegedly a reason for failure in investigations.
The city police said that though they had been conducting regular awareness camps on the cyber crime, the cases keep increasing. The police even do not rule out negligence of the people.Citing a case study of a retired DSP from Gajuwaka, city police commissioner T Yoganand said, “We had counselled him on the cyber crime and the latter is aware of those crimes. But he has lost the money in an OTP case. Upon asking why he has revealed, the retired police officer said that he had received 10 calls and he was convinced that the culprit belonged to bank.”
On cracking cases, the CP pointed out the non-availability of identity of the accused. According to him, most of the accused, who belong to Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh traced through their bank accounts are said to be giving wrong identity on their Aadhaar card and the mobile SIM cards. Each and every clue for police turns out to be useless when the teams reach the spot for investigation. Moreover, the Cyber crime investigation cell in Vizag is also ill-equipped with acute shortage of manpower and equipment.
Even Director-General of Police N Sambasiva Rao during his visit to Visakhapatnam on Dec 5 to inaugurate a cyber crime workshop opined that at present even one per cent of policemen in AP are not equipped to investigate cyber crime.
“Out of 100 cyber crime cases, only 10 reach police stations and out of them one gets registered. The investigation for that one cyber crime doesn’t go well,” Sambasiva Rao said. The city now hopes that the long pending Cyber crime police station for which land had already been allotted near the Passport office would materialise. Meanwhile, the DGP recently proposed setting up of Digital Cyber Lab with `10 to `30 crore with the city topping in the number of cyber crimes.