THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Cyber scammers are on the prowl in Kerala, targeting anyone from farmers, IT professionals, pensioners to even priests.
As per latest reports, fraudsters swindled a whopping Rs 635 crore from gullible Keralites until October 28 this year through different scams, top among them being online trading and job scams.
The amount siphoned off is three times what fraudsters bilked from people last year. With two months to go until 2025, this figure is expected to touch Rs 800 crore. Despite their best efforts, enforcement authorities could retrieve just about Rs 87.5 crore a little over 10% of the money lost the data from the Kerala Police cyber investigation division has revealed.
In all, nearly one lakh incidents of fraud came to light in the state this year, while around 32,000 cases were registered. The statistics reveal that scammers targeted all sections of Kerala’s population.
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.
There were about 3,050 cases where the amount swindled exceeded Rs 1 lakh. An analysis also revealed that most victims fell for trading scams (1,157), followed by job scams (1,002) and courier scams (211).
And as per the age profiling done, most victims were aged between 30 and 40 years (981), followed by those in the 20-30 (637) and 40-50 (552) age groups.
Cyber division officials confirmed an upsurge in online financial scams and said the scammers were resorting to myriad ways to bamboozle their victims.
Police pin hopes on AI-based tool
“Cyber investigators are diligently tracking the cases and taking action. However, whenever we tighten the screws on them, the fraudsters find new ways to scout and exploit gullible people. It’s only via heightened vigilance by the public can the designs of these scamsters be countered,” said an officer.
The cyber wing of the police blacklisted more than 22,000 mobile phones involved in cyber frauds and rendered them inoperable over the past one year, besides blocking over 13,000 SIM cards that the fraudsters used to contact victims.
The wing is now pinning hopes on an artificial intelligence-based tool that is in the pipeline, believing it will help people check the genuineness of apps, links, social media profiles and phone numbers that solicit investments. Users will be able to copy and paste URLs, social media accounts, phone numbers and other information that raises their suspicion into the tool, which will run it by the repository of state and central law enforcement agencies for a match.
