With the Indian government striving towards a cashless economy by expanding the scope of digitisation across all activities, the widening internet modes this will foster will need to be safeguarded from cyber crime and cyber fraud.
Online databases and transactions are getting increasingly vulnerable to hackers today with their ever innovative tools. Cases of banking frauds from phishing, cloning charge cards, cyber stalking, hacking accounts and databases, and impersonation are already on the rise in India, but detection has been weak in the absence of effective policing and monitoring, especially in individual cases. Less than a fifth of the cases registered with the cyber police have been solved over the last four years. In Mumbai, the financial capital of the country, as much as 80 per cent of the crimes registered in 2016 has remained undetected.
As per Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, banks in India reported 9,500, 13,083 and 16,468 cases related to cyber frauds like breach of accounts during 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16, respectively.
Pointing out that detecting cyber cases has become challenging as most such criminals use servers based out of India, the Mumbai cyber police see this situation presenting a severe hindrance in resolving the cases owing to the long-drawn procedures that are mostly beyond their jurisdiction. They yet say that they are continuously at work on cracking down online frauds and are monitoring the situation as best they can. Asked what challenges lay ahead for the city police in 2017, Mumbai Police Commissioner Dattatray Padsalgikar retorts: “Cyber crime is a threat.”…Click HERE to read full article.
