The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Rapacious killjoys of cyberia

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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Rapacious killjoys of cyberia

Staff Reporter

Internet fraudsters are exploiting social-networking web sites to cheat Net users of money.

Thiruvananthapuram: Internet fraudsters are increasingly exploiting social-networking web sites, such as Orkut and Facebook, to cheat unsuspecting Net users of considerable sums of money, says Debasis Nayak, Director, Asian School of Cyber Laws, New Delhi.

At a seminar on “Cyber crime and cyber laws” organised by the Centre for Development of Imaging Technology here last week, he said fraudsters posing as attractive Russian women sent e-mails to single men in India (whose profiles and photographs are posted on such web sites) stating that they found them attractive and would like to marry them.

They also sent photographs of attractive women models, often sourced from the Internet, to lure the men. The fraudsters created false profiles on social-networking sites to convince their victims that they were genuine.

The victim, now already curious, candidly sent the fraudster information about himself. Over a period of six to 15 weeks, the fraudster established a good rapport with his or her victim. They would decide to meet in India to take their relationship further. At this point, the fraudster stated that “she” did not have money to travel to India. Often, the victim readily agreed to meet “her” travel expenses and transferred the required funds to the fraudster’s Russian bank account number. The fraudster broke all contacts with the victim after “she” received the money.

Quoting National Crime Records Bureau statistics, Mr. Nayak said 76 cases of hacking (destruction, deletion or alteration of information) were reported in India in 2007. The same year, the police registered 73 cases of cyber fraud resulting in financial loss to the complainants.

As many as 99 cases of publication and dissemination of pornographic and defamatory material were registered. He said cyber criminals often used e-mail to defame and blackmail their victims. Four cases of unauthorised access to computer networks which resulted in data theft were reported.

Online lottery scams were also becoming increasingly common. The fraud started when a web user got an e-mail stating that he or she had won a major online lottery by inadvertently visiting some web site.

If the web users replied to the e-mail, they got a second e-mail stating that they should pay a certain amount of money for transferring the lottery amount to their respective bank accounts in India.

The fraudster broke all contact with his victim once he got the “initial processing amount” transferred to his account.

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