A brief encounter of the cyber police kind

A brief encounter of the cyber police kind

Disclaimer: This article is not meant to disrespect or undermine any person or authority’s capabilities, but purely an articulation of my brief personal experience.

Last week I had a brief encounter with the cyber police division, reason being, I was reaching out to them to help a friend who got hacked when he was out of the country. I spent probably a little more than an hour at the station, with about 15 minutes of actual time explaining the issue and trying to get help with a relevant person.

Summarizing below my experience.

• Most of the people were there to give a complaint (i’d say 90% of them) about them losing their money from their bank account due to some kind of fraudulent activity.
  • This included multiple instances of unauthorized withdrawal from ATMs, access from credit/debit cards, etc.
  • Money lost ranged from about 10,000 to a few lakhs.
• Again, for these complaints, it seemed like the process was the victim has registered a complaint with the bank, the bank has asked them to file a complaint with the cyber police and get an acknowledgement/FIR copy, submit it back to the bank so that they can then probably figure out a refund or whatever they have to do.
• Like any other police station, unfortunately, “jurisdiction” defines if they will even take a complaint in the first place.
  • It is surprising that there are jurisdictions defined for cyber crimes, when internet has no jurisdiction.
• The people at the counter there interacted with the complainants reasonably well, but maybe not very sensibly.
  • If someone has sent an email threatening to leak your personal photos online, I’d wouldn’t expect to be asked to reply to the mail and then see what response I’d get.
• If you are there about crypto currency, you might as well not bother going there.

In conclusion, at least from my limited and probably basic exposure, the people there who interact with the people walking in didn’t seem to understand how deep the rabbit hole can be when it comes to cyber crimes and security. They may have an awesome and specialized team to handle serious cases, but that may leave the majority of the people, who are mostly victims like mentioned above, without much to take back except an official acknowledgement that the complaint has been received.

Hopefully things are being relooked at and are being changed and upgraded to make sure that these cases are not dealt with the same way as your regular cases.

But until that happens, watch your backs and always ask a techie if they can help or guide you secure your online assets.

 

#security #cybersecurity #fraud #fake #technology