Two blocks in Jamtara prosper on cyber lucre

Ranchi/Dumka: Tribal villages in Jamtara district's Narainpur and Karmatantr blocks have propered in the last few years. Swanky bikes and sports utility vehicles do not surprise villagers anymore. A realty boom is also visible. This is all thanks to cyber crime and the growing number of youth who have been caught in the network for the lure of fast money.
Several cases of phishing and vhishing lodged in many states have turned the tribal district in Santhal Pargana into the country's cyber crime den. Though the number of cases lodged at various police stations in Jamtara is only 100, the innumerable complaints lodged in Asansol, Lucknow and New Delhi led police to Jamtara's Narainpur and Karmatantr.
Jamtara police said two or three tribal youth went to Uttar Pradesh a few years ago in search of employment. But they got trained in cyber fraud and after they came back to the village, they lured more youngsters into the network. The cyber 'business' appeared profitable and many youngsters got trained in communication skills. Thereafter, they used to get several sim cards and called up people to get their bank account details.
Vineet Kumar, cyber crime expert and founder of Cyber Peace Foundation who has worked closely with Jharkhand police for setting up the Cyber Defense Research Centre in Ranchi, told TOI that the vhishing software is extensively used by new-age hackers. "They can call anyone from any number, including toll-free numbers of noted banks and convince the customers to divulge their credit, debit and account details," he said.
Another expert at Cyber Peace Foundation said cyber crime kingpins provide hackers with a software. These hackers then only have to feed details of account holders into the software and within minutes money is transferred through various payment gateways to the desired account.
Jaideep Lakra, deputy SP Jamtara, said obtaining information from payment agencies like Paytm, Violet or private recharge sites is not an easy task. "Money is often transferred to bank accounts and when we try to trace those accounts, we find that those belong to poor or old people who have no idea about accounts being opened in their names," he said, admitting that since financial inclusion programmes got a boost in the past one year, KYC (know your customer) norms have been made easy leading to more confusion.
Pradip Kumar Mandal, a student of S P College in Dumka who was arrested in February, is known to have undergone training in various softwares, including Paytm, Moby, Oxygen Violet etc commonly being used for transferring amount from the victims' bank account.
Dumka DIG Dev Bihari Sharma denied existence of any such training centre in the district or elsewhere but did not rule out the possibility of online tutorials. On direction of chief minister Raghubar Das, two top cyber experts in the state administration, secretary to CM Sunil Kumar Barnwal and additional DGP SN Pradhan are working on founding Jharkhand Cyber Coordination Center, an autonomous body to check such incidents.
Sources in the police department said not just innocent villagers but some of the high profile people like Judges, IAS and IPS officers too have fallen victim to the hackers as complaints registered in Asansol district of Bengal, Lucknow of Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi have led their respective policemen to Jamtara in course of their investigation.