‘Even The Highly Educated Fall For Cyber Frauds; Awareness Is Best Remedy’
Soumya Pandey, ACP Cyber Crime Cell, Lucknow, says that there is no term called a ‘digital arrest’ mentioned in the Bhartiya Nyay Sanhita or CrPC. Her Views:
The only common factor in the cyber-crime activities across the world is money: Be it fake money credited to an account, lucrative loan schemes, work from home frauds, online shopping or sale, credit card or insurance frauds, data theft, dating apps, etc, the main motive of the scammers/cyber criminals is to extract money, either by black mailing a victim or luring him/her with attractive and deceiving offers.
As technology is continuously upgrading, our life and day to day activities have also, in a manner, become dependent on the digital atmosphere surrounding us. Be it social media or our other activities like banking, shopping, health, travel, etc, are some way or the other connected with the digital world and this is where we, knowingly or unknowingly, leave what we call digital loopholes.
As it is also a universal fact that we, as humans, cannot master the fast evolving world (including the digital world), we cannot become complete experts as new advancements keep taking place every day. In this era of cyber-crime, our vigilance and presence of mind is very important. Mistakes are natural and bound to happen in human life and we commit some carelessness for which we regret later.
One of the latest tools of deception and fear adopted by cyber criminals is ‘digital arrest’ and it is very surprising to see that a majority of victims are highly educated and affluent people. The losses people are incurring are due to a couple of reasons – fear and guilt (of becoming a laughing stock). We are also at times surprised by the social and educational status of the victims but by the time they come out of fear and reach us, it is, in many cases, too late.
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What we, through various forms of media and reach out activities, constantly and over and over again tell and educate people is to speak out – if you receive any such calls related to digital arrest or, by any chance you have become a victim, please reach out to us or at least your friends and relatives.
I would once again like to very clearly mention that there is no legal provision like digital arrest during investigation by any investigating agency in any investigation process. Cyber thugs often take advantage of our greed, fear, emotions, our needs and to some extent, our hectic life where we tend to forget giving some time to ourselves and introspect.
The best remedy to avoid such situations and losses is to be alert and remain informed as all forms of media is full of such criminal activities and also with suggestions and do’s and don’ts to help you stop falling prey to such activities. In addition, besides not sharing your personal banking and other related information to unknown person, we should also avoid updating our day to day activities like movies, vacations, etc on social media as by doing this, you become prone to such crimes and your life becomes an open book for anyone to hack it and rewrite it.
As told to Rajat Rai
