"Media needs to create more awareness about cyber crime", says Mohanty, ACP, Bengaluru

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report tilted: Crime in India-2012, Bengaluru accounts for 24.4% of cyber crimes booked under the IT Act among 53 ‘megacities' across India. The IT capital also accounts for some of the unique cyber crimes including credit card cloning and increasing the limit of prepaid cards among others. In an endeavor to get a vantage view on the cyber crimes, DQ Channels spoke to Bengaluru's Additional Commissioner of Police (crime) (ACP) Pronab Mohanty. In a candid conversation, the commissioner shared his experiences and held media to be the harbinger of cyber awareness.

Hacking, child pornography, credit card frauds, phising, defamation etc are the most common heard cyber crimes. What kinds of cases are reported in Bengaluru?

Most of the cyber crimes are reported under Sec. 66A of the IT Act i.e sending offensive messages through computer, internet etc. All these come under infamous section 66A of the IT Act. This is followed by hacking: Section 66 of computer related offenses, followed by identity theft. Phising also forms some of the crimes. Sec. 419 cases popularly known as Nigerian money scams are some of the recent trends.

Do you see much of the crimes reported in the police station. We hear lot of it in our peer conversations but the issues don't land up in police station. If yes why?

People think that it is a problem that it will go away. That it is a temporary problem and will stop but then the alleged criminal gets emboldened. Women are the most affected, typically on a social media platform.

So do Bengaluru police have separate women cell to address.

No. We have cyber crime cell under CID. We also have technical centre in Aadugodi that handles the cases. But to answer the earlier question, most people are image conscious that they would get defamed if they come to public domain. So they don't come to the police station. There are some other problems behind that like failed love affair which the person does not want to report.

What is credit card cloning?

So this partly comes as conventional crime and partly as InfoTech crime where a person takes any one's credit card and beat its magnetic strip or hack such information available on the server. And print a different credit card using a very simple credit card printing machine. We had a case where Kumar Mangalam Birla's card was stolen and the criminal used 1.87 crore of amount from it. It also got the publicity it deserved.

 

Can you reveal some other unique cyber crimes in Bangalore?

I observed a strange crime once. Companies like Amazon and others have temporary prepaid cards with $500 limit or more. There criminals hacked the card and increased the limits from $ 500 to $ 5000 and no message ever went to consumer or credit card service provider.In all different kinds of crime, cyber crime is the most recurring. First of all it belongs to the subset called the white collar crime, which in itself are recurring. It is matter of grave concern.

Do you think our police are technologically geared. What are the loopholes?

No, unfortunately not. One of the challenges is creating the technical base like creating the facility or creating capabilities and by working on more and more tech savvy police and training them. To an extent NASSCOM and DSCI are working on it but we need more people. But people who are educated and know all this stuff is reluctant the police force? They would prefer jobs which would compensate them much more than the police department. Having said that "we have trained some people but to a very few. The capacity building has not been enough."

What is the strength of the police handling cyber crimes now?

We rely on CID and the personnel within city police who are cyber savvy. They are aware of these things on their own; they have studied and come to know about it. But talking about technical prowess, the CID has got a technical team.

Bengaluru also has Cyber labs...?

There are two cyber labs, one is the police-CID cyber lab, the other is NASSCOM cyber lab which is higher in terms of proficiency levels. Both are the cyber wings of CID. They operate in tandem with the cyber police. Suppose a case comes in they are referred to these labs. The analysis may be forensics or looking at some aspect of the crime that pertains to the cyber crime legally or technically. They will look into different kinds of forensic tools to look into the data and so on so forth.