The Ministry of Home Affairs has initiated an on-ground analysis, starting from ‘phishing capital’ Jamtara, to plan a roadmap aimed at addressing cybercrimes evolving through such attacks.
Senior officials of the ministry visited cities infamous for cyber crooks — Jamtara, Deoghar, Giridih and Bokaro — and met top officials of the state such as DG of Jharkhand Police.
According to sources, the officials will not limit their probe to these locations but will visit a few more places to understand the situation on the ground and plan a roadmap. The sources added that it is a pan-India task, which will help the central government address the issue of related cybercrime.
Notably, the Home Ministry wants to understand how mostly uneducated youth manage to commit cyber frauds. It will also analyse the plan of rehabilitation of unemployed youth involved in cybercrimes.
“We have informed Home Ministry officials about state concerns. We need dedicated funds to set up a system to fight cybercrimes. Also, MHA has plans for rehabilitation and enrolling these unemployed youth in some other work as most of them are from very poor backgrounds,” a senior official of Jharkhand told News18.
Discussing the possibility of rehabilitating those part of the syndicate or enrolling them in “nation-building work”, the official said: “It would be more dangerous for the government to keep them in jails as they will interact with others and also fan out in nearby states like Bihar. Rehabilitation would be a long-term plan for stopping them from taking the crime route.”
The network of the scamsters is spread far and wide and they are now expanding their footprint beyond Jamtara. They target people in all states — be it Bollywood celebrities or government officers — and are responsible for almost 60 per cent of the phishing cases in India.
“Once [Bollywood veteran] Amitabh Bachchan also shared an instance where he was fooled by youths of Jamtara. Various collectors, judicial officers, ministers, their family members etc have been trapped by these crooks,” the senior government official added.
According to the Union government, to strengthen the mechanism to deal with cybercrimes in a comprehensive and coordinated manner, it has taken steps for spreading awareness such as issuance of alerts and advisories; capacity building/training of law enforcement personnel, prosecutors and judicial officers; and improving cyber forensic facilities.
“Ministry of Home Affairs has established Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) to provide a framework and eco-system for LEAs to deal with the cyber crimes in a comprehensive and coordinated manner. The Government has launched the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (www.cybercrime.gov.in), to enable public to report incidents pertaining to all types of cyber crimes, with a special focus on cyber crimes against women and children,” the ministry has said.
It added: “Cyber crime incidents reported on this portal, their conversion into FIRs and subsequent action thereon are handled by the State/UT law enforcement agency concerned as per the provisions of the law. Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System has been launched for immediate reporting of financial frauds and to stop siphoning off funds by the fraudsters.”
As per the information reported and tracked by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), a total of 454, 472, 280 and 138 phishing incidents were observed during the year 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 (up to June) respectively.
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