Bengaluru cops to rope in banks, ISPs to fight cyber crime

The city’s police may have increased its cyber-crime combatting footprint, but a vital issue persists.

On December 12 last year, Bengaluru city’s cyber crime FIR system registered its 9,999th case. Soon after, it crashed. The automated registry of the main cyber crime police station in India’s IT capital was simply not built to log cases beyond the four-figure mark.

Cut to 2020, and eight specialised cyber crime and economic offences police stations across the city are sharing the burden of the nearly 7,800 cyber-crime cases registered till the end of November.

The city’s police may have increased its cyber-crime combatting footprint, but a vital issue persists. Only about 10 per cent of cyber-crimes are investigated to the satisfaction of complainants —nearly 60 per cent of whom are people who have lost money in frauds or have been targeted with morphed pictures.

A key reason for the poor resolution rate, particularly in cases of online monetary fraud, is the crucial time gap between the discovery of the crime by the victim and the registration of a complaint by the police—referred to as the “golden period”.

Now, the Bengaluru Police are now working on creating an automated, real-time system for stopping cyber crimes which will work in conjunction with banks, payment services, internet service providers, social media firms, and even judiciary, to catch these crimes early.

At the heart of this Cyber Crime Information Report, or CIR, system is a BPO mechanism being built for the police by a tech firm.

The system will alert banks and internet services within two hours, the golden period, to block a transaction or a social media account reported to be linked to a cyber offence.

“Under the prevailing rules, it is mandatory that you come and file a complaint in the police station and you have to sign the FIR. What we are proposing is that wherever a person is located and gets an intimation of an illegal financial transaction, then he can intimate us in real-time,” said Bengaluru Police Commissioner Kamal Pant.

Within the the 24/7 BPO system, police officers and technicians will look to stop a cyber crime as soon as a victim alerts the police.

“The moment a person reaches us, a complaint will be created. It will instantaneously alert the nodal officers of banks and service providers. The basic purpose would be to stop further transactions because we have a two hour period to block and reverse transactions with banks,” the Bengaluru police commissioner said.

” We have reached 70 per cent of the creation of the system,” the Police Commissioner said.

The Police is working with the judiciary as well to obtain orders swiftly.

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‏Source indianexpress.com