The talks between the City Police and the management of a prominent web portal dealing with the sale of second-hand goods such as vehicles and cellphones remained inconclusive, with the site owners disagreeing on a number of suggestions made by the police to curb the spurt in cyber crimes, here on Friday.
The city police invited the site management after a series of online frauds were recorded by the cyber police stations. “In the last six months, eight fruads amounting to ₹13 lakh have been recorded. The fraudsters uploaded pictures of cars and phones for sale on the website. They asked buyers to pay advance amount through online bank transactions. After the payments were made, they vanished into thin air,” said DCP (Crime) A.R. Damodhar, adding that there were cases in which the buyers had paid advances of ₹3.68 lakh, ₹3.5 lakh and ₹ 2 lakh for purchase of second-hand cars.
The police said when they came up with some suggestions to prevent such crimes, the website management washed off their hands by saying that the portal was only a platform to host buy and sell advertisements, and buyers were not supposed to pay advances, said Mr. Damodhar.
“Moreover, we wanted their technical team to understand the issues, and they must sent a person from the legal department, said DCP (Law and order) K. Fakkeerappa.
Suggestions made
The City Police suggested that the website owners should ask for the KYC of each person who host an advertisement, to which the owners did not agree.
“We also asked them to regulate the fake job advertisement. But, they said that it was not possible for them to do. However, they agreed to make the fraud department in their group pro-active,” said Mr. Fakkeerappa.
The City Police also asked the website owners to check and regulate the content being uploaded and share the login and logout IP logs. But, they said they were yet to take a decision on the issue.
Alert system
The web portal management, however, agreed to alert the police if any transaction crossed ₹1 lakh. “This will enable us to go for a physical verification of the buyer and seller and the frauds can be reduced,” said Mr. Fakkeerappa.
The police also have asked the site owners to float exclusive number for recording frauds. “Right now, all calls are routed through the call centre and we have asked for an exclusive number to respond on all listed languages, to which they agreed to look into,” said the DCP.
