Bengaluru police to rope in crack team to tap golden hour, solve cybercrime

BENGALURU: With a dismal track record of solving less than 10% of cybercrime cases in the past two years, Bengaluru police and the State government have decided to put in place resources and procedures required to solve the high number of crimes.

Police Commissioner Kamal Pant said that a crack technical team of two or four members would be brought in to effectively utilise the crucial golden hour -- the gap between occurrence of the crime and time taken to report it to police. 

“Time is of the essence when it comes to cybercrime. The technical team will be able to track the transfer of money and location of the person behind the crime. They will also train our officers,” Pant said.

According to a source, the team could be in place in a week’s time.

At a meeting with senior police officers recently, Home Minister Basavaraj Bommai said police would work with banks to quicken response time, and put in place a system where police and banking networks would be activated when a crime is reported.Additional Commissioner (West) Soumendu Mukherjee said they were working to shorten the time it takes to register a case. Currently, complainants must physically go to a station to get an FIR registered.

“We are thinking of fine-tuning the system so we can get cases registered more seamlessly on real-time basis. A dedicated team to assist in this is also very crucial during that golden hour. Legal and procedural requirements will need to be looked into. Lack of security on each payment gateway is also there. We will require more trained manpower to address the growing cases,” Mukherjee said.

Fraud cases top list
95% of cybercrimes are financial frauds. Police at the eight Cyber Economic Narcotics stations confirmed that frauds on OLX and debit/credit card scams are the highest number in the city. “Recently, a man lost Rs 10 lakh while placing an order online. On average, we register 6-10 FIRs every day,” said Renuka, CEN (South) inspector.Curiously, most victims are educated people, and techie-hub Whitefield has the highest number of cases in the city, at 1,152.