Indians have educated themselves of Cyber crime

If you think cyber crime is a growing menace in the city, think again. The police efforts have started showing results.

Cyber crime, which had seen a 12.5%increase last year as compared to 2008, has decreased by nearly 40% in the first quarter of this year. The police give credit to public awareness for the trend.

According to the statistics available with the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell (CCIC) of the Mumbai police, complaints of credit card fraud saw an increase of around 54% in 2009, as compared to 2008. That has come down by 75% in the first quarter of this year.


Similarly, applications for Nigerian online fraud had increased to 244% in 2009 as compared to 2008. The trend has come down this year, with the police receiving merely nine complaints.

There had been an increase in corporate frauds in the past two years. Applications with regard to hacking and tampering of source codes had gone up by 10.41 % last year, as compared to 2008.

The number of similar complaints received in the first quarter this year is just 11% of last year’s first-quarter count, the police said. Also, numbers of applications have come down in cases of fake profile, defamation and obscene content posted on the internet.

“The awareness is growing among the people. That is why cyber crime cases have decreased,” senior police inspector Mukund Pawar of CCIC said.

Joint commissioner of police (crime) Himanshu Roy too credited the people for this happy trend. “Stricter security measures adopted by the banks have led to the decrease of credit card frauds. Cyber security measures have been reviewed and monitored by the banks, which is why hacking into banks accounts and ATM frauds are no longer easy,” Roy said.

He added that even the criminals had realised that the anonymity which they felt was there in the cyber world, can now be breached.


“There used to be an impression that mischief through the internet cannot be traced. It is not correct. Even criminals have now realised that they can be traced, and action can be taken against them. We have seen people posting obscene contents on social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook and Twitter getting traced and caught,” Roy said. He added that the psyche of people behind posting such malicious content in the internet was to defame someone owing to some personal grudges or just for the sake of fun.