According to Gulshan Rai, ex-Cyber Security Coordinator and Member of Global Board at IRCC, lack of awareness among people and vulnerabilities in the system allow hackers to commit cybercrimes.
Approximately 125 people have been detained and 66 arrested for at least 28,000 financial cyber-crimes across Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Andaman & Nicobar. All victims put together were defrauded to the tune of Rs 100 crore.
About 102 teams of 5,000 policemen raided 14 villages to arrest the accused. 40 cyber experts were involved in the probe. Assistance was sought from banks, NPCI, UPI intermediaries, UIDAI, DoT and social media to investigate the nationwide cyber-attack launched from Nuh district in Haryana. 219 bank accounts and 140 UPI accounts were used for committing these frauds.
Victims were lured on Facebook and OLX with fake ads. Victims who called on the numbers advertised were cheated on the pretext of courier charges. Fake work from home advertisements on social media were used to cheat people. Victims were identified using UPI apps and then duped by impersonation. Honey trapping and blackmailing people was also part of the modus operandi.
The accused were 18–35-year-olds working in groups of four. They acquired SIM cards, bank account details, stolen phones and technical services through certain people in the village. At least 347 sim cards acquired from 14 state were used in the crime.
Police have recovered 166 fake Aadhaar cards, five pan cards, 128 ATM cards, 66 mobile phones, 99 sim cards, 5 point of sale machines and three laptops from the accused.
According to Gulshan Rai, ex-Cyber Security Coordinator and Member of Global Board at IRCC, lack of awareness among people and vulnerabilities in the system allow hackers to commit cybercrimes.
“These are not cybercrime issues per se, these are cyber physical crime issues because both physical activity and cyber activity is involved. The attackers just need intelligence, a computer system and a telephone connection to commit these frauds. The vulnerabilities are in the system — our telephones, laptops or computers — are not guarded by antivirus kind of software or the software are not updated and upgraded and as a result, the hackers exploit those systems and send phishing mails. There is also lack of awareness among people. Hackers keep sending mails randomly and people without understanding just click it and pass over their data to the hackers,” Rai said.
Varun Singla, SP of Nuh, Haryana said, “The cybercrime was serious and was developing at an exponential rate. So we had to intervene to break the nexus of this kind. When we started out, we were not aware that this will unearth so much of cybercrime related complaints. When we shared the details with the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, there were linkages with 28,000 complaints which were already registered with different states and the total amount of the fraud was totalling around Rs 100 crore.”
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(Edited by : Pradeep John)
First Published: May 23, 2023 8:35 PM IST