Mumbai: The Maharashtra cyber cell has recorded 2,800 crimes in the first 10 months of 2019, which comes to 10 cyber crimes registered every day.
The most number of crimes in the state were in connection to the net banking and debit/credit card frauds. Interestingly, the cyber crime in the state has gone down a notch, with a notable increase only in banking frauds.
The data released by the Maharashtra cyber cell has painted an alarming picture of a nearly two-fold increase in the number of cyber crimes registered in the last five years. While 1,684 cases of cyber crime were reported in 2015, over 2,789 cases were reported in the first 10 months of the year.
This spurt is a result of primarily two reasons — first, being the country’s richest state, Maharashtra has a high penetration of the internet and mobile telephony. The second is that the state police cyber crime detection department is one of the most advanced in the country.
With the present figures of cyber crime in the state, it seems that over 10 cases are registered on a daily basis. In Mumbai, most of these cases are handled at the police station level in the cyber cell set up at every police station.
Only the ones with complications are referred to the cyber police station at the Bandra Kurla Complex, where officers with specialised skills tackle these cases.
In cases of state-wide cyber crimes, they are directly referred to the Maharashtra cyber cell, where cases are allocated to officers depending on the nature of crime.
An officer from the cyber police attributed the rise in the number of cases to more people coming forward to register complaints. “Detection and conviction rate is a problem that the cyber police is still tackling with.
However, over the last year, more than 1,500 policemen were trained officers at the police station-level and have a separate cyber cell in every police station. With this, we are expecting both the detection and conviction rates to improve,” said the officer.
A process was on to set up a ‘knowledge hub’ to provide information to banks about debit card cloning and cyber attacks, which is being handled by the Pune district urban banks’ association.
A senior cyber police official said, “Despite various reminders given to the citizens to not share their privy banking details and One Time Passwords (OTP), they continue to turn a deaf ear and fall prey to cybercrimes at large.
With a whopping spurt in netbanking and credit/debit card frauds, we have started to educate not only citizens but also the banks, to keep the criminals at bay.”
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