There has been a spurt in cyber crimes against women for years and the lockdown has made the stalkers much bolder, said speakers at a webinar on ‘Cyber crime against women’, organised by the APCID and Cyber Peace Foundation.
Centre for Development of Advanced Computing joint director Indraveni K said that there was a significant increase in cyber crimes against women during lockdown. According to data of the National Commission for Women, 54 cyber crime complaints were received online in April this year in comparison to 37 complaints received online in April 2019.
She said there were 412 genuine complaints of cyber abuse from March 25 till April 25, 2020. Out of these, 396 complaints were serious in nature.
While discussing the social media offences, online sexual offences and financial scams, she explained Facebook cloning, and how to protect one's account from cloning. She also talked about checking if the accounts were cloned and explained the action to be taken if the account was cloned or hacked.
Reverse image search
With the help of reverse image search in Google, people can check if their photo was used somewhere else, she said and gave some security tips to women on matrimonial websites, emails, messages, discounts, and coupon codes.
Superintendent of Police (cyber crimes) G.R. Radhika said that NCRB data in 2018 revealed that 6,030 cyber crimes were registered by women. "In India 71 crore people are using the Internet, out of which, 25 crore are women. She said 80% of people are falling prey to cyber crimes and 63% of people don’t know where to lodge complaints on cyber crimes."
She discussed the types of social media crimes like profile hacking, photo morphing, offers and shopping scams, and dating scams, link baiting, information theft, cyber bullying.
She also explained the harassment of women on social media done by messages, calls, videos, photo morphing etc. She advised people to make use of WhatsApp number 9017666667, AP CID 4S 4U web portal, 112 toll free number and Disha police stations for reporting on cyber crimes.
On Thursday, a webinar will be held on ‘Online frauds - online shopping scams’. One can click on https://m.youtube.com/
EyKgSq8DcnLHMQ to take part in the webinar.