79 fall victim to cybercrime in Gurugram daily

Sanjay Yadav

Gurugram, July 17

Cybercrime cases are on the rise as more than 79 people in Gurugram fall victim to cyber frauds every day. As many as 11,195 cybercrime complaints have been filed in the five months of the year (January to May).

The cyber criminals defrauded around Rs 80 crore in these past five months. In the first five months of last year, this figure was close to Rs 18 lakh. The local police said that they are working on both prevention and detection.

A senior police officer said that a new trend has started in cybercrime cases. While banking fraud, fraud through social networking sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter and website-hacking cases are common, cyber criminals now focus on task fraud through work from home.

To offer quick money through tasks like sharing and liking videos in the beginning and later, asking victims to invest money in tasks, they dupe people. People — in the greed of quick money – land into the net easily. Nowadays, most cases being reported relate to task frauds.

According to police data in these five months, a total of 11,195 complaints regarding cyber crimes were registered. Last year, in the same duration, 5,249 complaints were registered.

While 198 cases were registered this year, 33 cases were registered last year. In the five months of last year, the police arrested 116 cyber criminals, but this year, the police have arrested 290 cyber criminals, including 21 foreigners.

“In the main cases now, task fraud, work from home, sextortion, duping through matrimonial sites, fake ads and other banking frauds like KYC, increasing of credit limit, fraud on pretext of electricity bill are trending. Nowadays, cyber criminals offer work from home and good return on investment. People have also become aware and immediately report these to cyber crime police stations,” said Raj Kumar Yadav, cyber security officer.

While cyber criminals defrauded a total of Rs 79,98,03,299, the police recovered Rs 2,90,12,137; 340 Euros and $2,000 from the accused in these five months.

“Cyber crime concerns awareness. We have conducted 73 training sessions and 119 awareness programmes to educate the general public to save them from cyber crime. We have arrested 290 cyber criminals in these five months. More than 170 raids were conducted outside Haryana and 68 raids were conducted within Haryana,” Siddhant Jain, DCP (cyber) told The Tribune.