Solving cyber crime a Task for the force
BENGALURU : Majority of the cyber crime cases reported, conclude with closure reports, usually filed where there are not sufficient grounds to investigate, shortly after the victims’ bank accounts are blocked. Due to the trend of increasing complexity and limited manpower within the city police department, cyber fraud cases are not being prioritised, said a senior officer attached to cyber crime investigations said.
“The fraudsters are more dedicated in planning the crime than the whole investigation planning. Most of the time, cyber crime investigations are on the back foot when other obligations such as bandobast or election duty or dealing with law and order crimes take priority,” the senior official highlighted.
The official added that, unlike minor law and order incidents like chain snatching, which are addressed with utmost seriousness, not always is a specialized team working exclusively on the cyber crime.
Given this trend, detection will remain unattainable even if the reporting percentage rises.
“In conventional crimes, even if the amount of money lost is not significant, the visual panic it creates is evident, unlike cybercrime, where apart from the victim, nobody else is visibly affected by the incident,” a senior official highlighted, and further said that unlike in conventional crime, where investigating officers can often trace the accused using CCTV footage and other physical evidence, tracking down a cyber fraudster is nearly impossible, due to multiple IP addresses.
Solving cyber crime cases often involves coordination between interstate law enforcement authorities, and once the accused is tracked down, it can solve more than 100 cases at a time as the fraudster uses thousands of SIM cards, multiple laptops, and phones, and tries different modus operandi on multiple victims.
While increasing the number of police forces involved in cracking these cases is essential, banks and telecom companies must also ensure that online payments cannot be completed while someone is still on a call. This is necessary because these fraudsters often distract victims on calls, said the senior official.
He added that an SMS alert or call should be triggered, whenever uses a different IP address to login, or makes payments at unusual times in case of net banking.