Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

Cyber crimes on the rise in State

G. Anand

Thiruvananthapuram: The Hi-Tech Crime Inquiry Cell here, a relatively unknown police unit, played a key role in unearthing the digital evidence that helped cracked the seditious e-mail case. The cell is currently providing expertise to the State police to solve an array of cyber crime cases, including Internet banking fraud, obscene portrayal of women citizens on the web and other online rackets.

The number of such cases being investigated by the State police seems to indicate that cyber crime is on the rise in Kerala. Recently, a non-resident Malayali, who had an account in a nationalised bank in Adoor, lost $10,000 when the bank authorities heeded a fake e-mail request to transfer the amount to an account in Ghana.

The police suspect that a bank employee had given the personal details of the account holder to the online fraudster.

In another case, the unit could help the police identify a Delhi-based student who had cheated an NRI of Rs.10,000 by promising to deliver two mobile phones the suspect had put up for auction on a website. The unit tracked the online transactions of the student and got his address from a Harayana-based individual who had sold him an electronic item.

In Mangalapuram, a person transferred a large sum of money as "processing charge" to a foreign bank account after he received an e-mail, which said he had won a lottery. Such "419 or Nigerian Scam" cases have been reported from other parts of the State. Even charitable organisations had been cheated in similar ways, the police said.

Another person in the district lost a significant amount of money and inadvertently compromised his personal details, including passport and bank account numbers, when he visited the "spoofed" website of a multinational firm in which he aspired for a job.

The police described the crime as "phishing." The fraudster had made the website look as the legitimate site of the organisation by mimicking the HTML code. He tricked his victim by promising him employment.

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