Fearing bad name residents don’t report cybercrime

LUDHIANA: Perception about offenders not getting caught coupled with the fear of disgrace is making very few city residents report about cybercrimes to the police, despite an increase in such incidents. These cybercrimes mostly relate to posting of fake profiles on social networking sites apart hacking and data thefts.

A woman, resident of Gill Road, requesting anonymity, said she was shocked when she started receiving bizarre and vulgar calls from unknown phone numbers on her cellphone. “Not knowing what to do, I did not even inform my family about the harassment leave alone reporting the matter to the police,” she said.

Finally, she told her employer about the problem and she came to know that her picture was put on Facebook with some vulgar messages and her phone number was also mentioned.

The site administrators removed her picture following a complaint from her end, but the woman, 25, fearing a bad name chose not to inform the police.

In a similar case, a girl student from Phase-I, Dugri, created a fake Facebook on her name. The alleged creator misused the account by reaching to friends of the girl, 21, and posting abusive comments to them.

“We could have complained to the police, but it takes a lot of time to trace culprit so we never wanted to get into all this. Finally, we sent mails to the administrator of the site and the account has now been blocked,” said the victim’s brother, a businessman.

Harpreet Singh, a businessman from BRS Nagar, was shocked to find his site hacked by someone from Russia, which was defaced by the hacker.

“A skull was being shown on my site. I was left shocked and clueless for sometime. To my embarrassment, many of my clients mailed and called me informing about the incident. Then I consulted some experts, who told me to write a mail to the administrators of the server on which my site is hosted. They plugged the loopholes and finally the site was restored. But there was lot of harassment for me and my clients,” he said.

On being asked why he did not complain the matter to the police, Harpreet said the hacker was from Russia and taking him to task was nearly impossible. “It is difficult and time consuming to track down someone in foreign lands. I don’t think we would have met with any success if I were to chase the offender,” he said.

The Ludhiana Police Commissioner Ishwar Singh when approached on the issue of non-reporting of cybercrimes, said, “We register cases when we get complaints from the residents on any cybercrime. However, even we have seen that not many people approach the police for the cybercrime related issues.”

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