Kerala - Kochi   

More complaints reaching Cyber Cell

KOCHI: The Cyber Cell of the City Police now faces the threat of being choked with complaints. The nature of complaints flooding the Cell ranges from missing second hand mobile phones to new films uploaded in cyberspace.

The production company of a new Malayalam film recently complained to the City Police Commissioner that the film has been made available for free download from a website and this has affected the commercial run of the film.

The Cyber Cell traced the suspect, who uploaded the film to the website, to Attingal in Thiruvananthapuram. This was made possible with the Cyber Cell having tie-ups with all internet service providers. A meeting of all internet and mobile phone service providers was convened by the Inspector General of Police, Ernakulam Range, last week to sort out issues related to processing complaints forwarded from the Cell.

“Processing of the complaints has been made fast as we are working paperless. Emails with digital signatures from the Cell are accepted by all the service providers, thus doing away with the procedural delays,” said Manoj Abraham, City Police Commissioner.

The Cyber Cell is also working towards evolving its own strategy against the new age crimes.

“There is no point in looking up to metros like Mumbai for models. Instead, what we are doing is evolving a Kochi-specific strategy, after tracking the nature of cases that are generated here,” said Mr. Abraham.

The Cell is also equipping itself to do routine monitoring of the cyberspace. “Tools to be employed in cyber policing are ready. We need some paid tools as well, which will be inducted soon,” he said.

The existing infrastructure at the Cell is backed up with an official channel of communication with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for supporting the investigations with digital evidences. Training session for personnel of the Cyber Cell with C-DAC has also been planned.

Already, the Cyber Cell has entered into agreements with major email providers and online communities.

This will ensure that any reports of abuse can be traced back to the offender in no time. Also, coming up is a major training session for the personnel of the force with e-bay, the online trading platform.

While majority of the cases are on profile abuse in community sites or email abuse, complaints regarding financial crimes, like misuse of credit cards and phishing, have also started being reported. During 2007 itself, the Cell handled one case of phishing and four cases each of credit card abuse and website hacking. Complaints can be lodged with the Cyber Cell at Crime Stopper numbers (IG’s Crime Stopper: 9846091096 and City Police Crime Stopper: 1090).

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