Mumbai: Last March, Dr Yusuf Matcheswalla got a frantic call from a worried friend. The friend had, hours ago, received an SOS email from Matcheswalla’s Gmail account, saying that his wallet had got stolen while on an official trip to South Africa and that he needed money desperately to return home. It also listed a bank account number where the emergency cash had to be transferred.
The friend replied to the email and received a response within hours. The language of the response,however,was suspicious. The friend called up Matcheswalla, a practising psychiatrist, and what they found shocked both of them: A hacker had breached Matcheswalla’s email account and sent out a fake plea to addresses on his address book. Matcheswalla filed a complaint with the Mumbai police, but the case is yet to be cracked.
The brilliant simplicity of the online Nigerian fraud has made it infamous, but there are many other cyber crimes that continue unabated in the byzantine World Wide Web partially because of the gobbledygook behind them. “Not many people are aware of the threats they subject themselves to on the internet,” said Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime).According to the cyber crime investigation cell (CCIC) of Mumbai police’s crime branch, cyber crimes go beyond the plain-vanilla forgery of credit cards or the hacking of websites. They include the lesser-heard phenomena of phishing (which is the process of trying to illicit sensitive information such as usernames, passwords from website users, usually via emails) and online job racketeering. And they include the crime of sending obscene text messages, threatening emails, or defaming people on social networking website by creating fake user accounts and by uploading obscene content.
Roy said a major reason these crimes continue in relative obscurity is that they hardly get registered. “Victims need to report such crimes. It will help us understand the patterns behind them.”
IT expert Vijay Mukhi said there is an urgent need to create more awareness about cyber crimes to safeguard the public. “The dangers of cyber crimes are very real. There are spyware programmes out there that are affecting people every day,” Mukhi added.
Matcheswalla agreed with Mukhi. “Very few people are aware about the different types of cyber crimes,” said Matcheswalla. “Even the well-educated fall prey to them, like it happened in the case of a Mira Road doctor got became a victim of the Nigerian fraud.”
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