Today most of the people in Hyderabad rely on Internet for many services. Internet usage in our city is increasing at a rapid pace. But the international connectivity of the Internet made it easy for criminals to conduct their illegal affairs quite easily. Hyderabad, home to several leading IT based companies is witnessing huge increase in cyber crime these days.
Cyber criminals causing huge financial losses are trapping innocent individual Internet users as well as companies. Many types of cyber crimes such as Nigerian fraud, Online shopping fraud, credit card frauds, password security, job and visa frauds etc are prevailing in our city.
Apart from the email fraud, criminals are now targeting mobile users with fraud calls or SMS. The most common one is Nigerian fraud, where you may get a call or SMS stating that you won millions of dollars of prize money and you need to send some processing fee to collect the money you won.
To fight against this cyber crime, Hyderabad police has recently launched ‘Delete’ campaign to educate and aware the Internet users about the cyber crimes. It teaches individuals and organizations to protect themselves online from various cyber threats. It also has a website on this campaign at http://www.hyderabadpolice.gov.in/DeleteCamp/WhatIsDelete.htm. This website provides stories of some real life cyber crime victims of Hyderabad.
There is only one Cyber Crime Police Station under the Crime Investigation Department (CID) in our state as of now. But due to the increase in cyber crime, the state government has sanctioned two exclusive Cyber Crime Police Stations (CCPS), one in Hyderabad and the other in Cyberabad.
These special police stations will have cyber crime labs to maintain all the systems, and to investigate the hardware and software. They assist in collecting, processing and analyzing the digital evidence to curb even the latest sophisticated crimes. The police department is planning to set up this kind of police stations in Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada also.
To know more about the cyber crime in our city, log on to http://www.hyderabadpolice.gov.in/ and when you are offline, you can SMS to 9010100100. To know about the authenticity of any suspicious emails, the Hyderabad police advised the public to send them to cyber crime cell, cyberps@cid.appolice.gov.in.