By Sarosh Bana.
A grisly upshot of the devastating pandemic has been that those who have been financially-stricken or have lost their livelihoods are now desperately pursuing ways to make money, with many taking to cybercrime as a profession. Woefully, their victims are often similarly financially-stricken individuals.
However, though cybercrime is evidently considered a crime in India as everywhere else, within the Indian cultural context, it is – very alarmingly – attaining a respectable, even coveted, sheen.
There are reports that in parts of central India, families scouting for prospective grooms for their daughters are asking whether the boys do ‘cyber’. With many of the jobless youth taking to ‘cyber’, short for cybercrime or hacking, they are being increasingly considered as good matches for their daughters, with their new calling being viewed as ‘service’, even as a corporate activity, which would ensure a steady income and a decent lifestyle.
There appear to be limitless opportunities in the world of hackers, ranging from digitally spying on someone for a price and harvesting personal data of unsuspecting persons, to accessing bank accounts by defrauding the gullible, or even setting up phishing scams for ‘customers’ overseas.
Worryingly, these fraudsters are adept at evading the law and are not restricted by geographical boundaries. Though there has been heightened awareness around cybersecurity risks such as ransomware and phishing scams, cybercriminals often have their way by adopting high technologies, inventing new crafts, and gaining the confidence of their target audiences.
A whole new industry has consequently emerged, and these tricksters are increasingly seeing their social standing rise as a result. So confident are they that they at times also advertise their skills and services on the internet and their competence in setting up a phishing operation or in scamming an individual or an entire enterprise. Reports mention that working for cross-border clients remains a far more attractive option for these for-hire swindlers as they can charge higher fees and get paid in foreign currency.
India’s financial capital of Mumbai is among the many cities in the country witnessing a surge in cybercrime where citizens, the young as well as the elderly, men as well as women, are falling prey to online marauders who have been progressively innovative in their craft.
If arrested, the culprits can be tried under India’s Information Technology Act, 2000, also known as IT Act, which seeks to protect people’s privacy and personal information online, and covers offences involving computers, computer systems, or computer networks in the country. It also criminalises acts like hacking, data theft, spreading of computer viruses, identity theft, defamation (sending offensive messages), pornography, child pornography, and cyber terrorism, and gives legal validity to electronic contracts and recognition of electronic signatures. However, the cyberpolice often find it difficult, if not impossible, to track down the culprits and then prove their crime. If it is a cross-border crime, the challenges are that much more. As a result, conviction rates are appallingly low.
In the recent crime conference of the Mumbai Police, cybercrime was acknowledged as a “challenging issue” and difficult to solve. Of the only 2,883 cybercrime cases that police deigned to register in 2021, only 455, or 16 per cent, were detected.
These numbers scarcely reflect the actual increase in online crime, because cyberpolice too are insufficient and both ill-equipped and unable to cope with the surging cyberfrauds. Sixteen officers and men constitute the total cyberpolice force in Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is the capital and which has a population of 125 million.
The government recently announced actress Priya Prakash Varrier as the brand ambassador for its Cyber Crime Awareness Campaign ‘Trapped.Zone’. The purpose of the campaign is to alert the youth against the potential threat from the dark side of the web and sensitise them about personal security. Varrier plays the role of a cybercrime victim in a film titled Love Hackers, which deals with the dark web and cybercriminals. “I feel honoured to be part of this campaign, as the cause is very personal to me,” she remarked. “I personally have been a victim of cyber harassment and bullying.” She urged people to be more vigilant in the virtual world and to be aware before updating anything on social media or starting a video chat with anyone.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has formed a joint committee of financial regulators, including officials from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), to effectively curtail the growing menace of phishing and cyber frauds through a process involving whitelisting.
“We are trying to address the issue of unsolicited commercial communication (UCC) through the joint committee of financial regulators such as the RBI and Sebi,” said TRAI secretary V. Raghunandan. “They (fraudsters) share a URL [Uniform Resource Locator, which is nothing more than the address of a given unique resource on the Web] with some changes that lead to a phishing site, and we are trying to address this by asking principal entities such as banks and other financial institutions to whitelist their websites or links.” A whitelist is a mechanism that labels some identified entities as authentic or trustworthy.
