Unsupportive social media firms leave Gurugram cops in lurch

| | Gurugram | in Sunday Pioneer

The Gurugram Police has approached the Haryana Government to urge the Central Government to ask social media service providers such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google and Yahoo to provide necessary help to police in solving cases of cyber crime.

The Haryana Police is facing difficulties in solving cases related to cyber fraud as social media platform providers are not cooperating. “Most of the complaints with the city police are related to WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram . Since headquarters of these companies are in foreign countries, it is quite difficult to directly communicate with these organisations,” a senior police officer said on condition of anonymity.

“In several cases, we have sent emails to these organisations to seek information related with any incident, IP address of the system and it took around a month to received information from them, sometimes they didn’t revert back,” he added. Last August, the Gurugram Police registered its first case of Ransomware attacks by Chinese hackers.

A city-based clothing company had reported to the Gurugram Police that hackers had demanded Rs 25 lakh from them as ransom. The other case involved a ransom demand of Rs 20,000. During the probe, the Gurugram cyber crime cell came to know that the Chinese hackers were behind the attacks. “It is quite difficult to nab the Ransomware attackers. The attack was from China and India has no goodwill with China to help Indian agencies to crack the case,” he said.

Meanwhile, this year till June 20, the Gurugram Cyber Crime Cell has received 1,834 complaints related to ATM fraud, online, bank fraud, credit cards, debit cards, Email hacking and hacking of Facebook accounts.

In which around 1,122 complaints are related to online banking fraud, 181 complaints of Facebook, Email frauds accounted for 75 cases, and 70 complaints related to the WhatsApp and six of Twitter, said a police official.

Police data shows that from January 1 to June 20, 2018, a total of 1,834 complaints of cyber crimes were reported and 23 FIRS lodged. In 2017, the cybercrime complaints were 2,792. The total number of cyber crimes that were reported in 2016 - 2,402.

“To resolve the issues with these organisations we used to talk to their representative during the seminars or any occasionally meet. We raised our problem with them so that they could help us to sort out the cases,” the official further said.