Cyber cops get cracking in city

Detect cases pertaining to ‘threat' emails and ‘Friendship Club'

The managing director of a private company in Visakhapatnam Export Processing Zone (VEPZ) at Duvvada received email threats from a fake email ID in January this year.

The nervous MD approached the City Police but the latter couldn't make much headway in cracking the case in the absence of specialists, who have the expertise to tackle such crimes.

Realising the importance of early detection of the growing cyber frauds, Police Commissioner J. Purnachandra Rao set up the Cyber Crime Wing in July this year with an Inspector as in-charge, one Assistant SI and two constables.

“The VEPZ MD case was handed over to us in October. We investigated the case in a systematic manner and arrested the accused in just one month,” says Cyber Crime CI C.M. Naidu.

The threatening mails were sent by a manager, who was terminated from service in July 2009. He had created a fake e-mail ID at an Internet café and sent the threat mails to terrorise his victim. “With the assistance of technical experts, we located the IP address and found out from where the emails were generated,” he said.

The Cyber Wing has also detected two ‘Friendship Club' cases. It may be recalled that an Intermediate student committed suicide after paying thousands of rupees to one such club after he was promised a job. He was made to pay the money through a fictitious online account.

The Cyber Wing has detected nine cases in the last three months and has an equal number of cases under investigation. There are four types of offences being committed by cyber criminals – using mobile phones or the computer for sending SMS or email threats, transmission of obscene pictures by morphing the face of the victim, transfer of funds from a person's account online without his/her knowledge and phishing. Mr. Naidu cautioned mobile banking users not to respond to phishing mails.

Banks never ask for confidential information of their customers through mails and when the latter get such mails, they should physically visit the bank and check with their banker about its authenticity.

“We are mostly depending on the Cyber Crimes CID in Hyderabad for assistance in tackling cyber crimes as we do not have the required infrastructure to deal with such cases,” he says. One can only hope that the State Government clears the proposal for setting up of Cyber Police Station in the city.