If I open the SMS section of my phone and scan it, I can see almost one message a week from a fraudster that can lead to what we club under the mysterious label of “cyber-crime” and blame the police for not solving it.
If I look at a couple of typical messages, they would be short, often with grammatical errors, containing a threat such as “your electricity will cut”, “your outgoing mobile service get stopped”, “your bank account will be block” (sic) etc..; with either another mobile number or an email address or a web-link for me to revert to.
As India has an incredible amount of mobile-phone population with some of the cheapest rates for internet connectivity on offer, mainly so that no corner of India can be deprived of the artistic work of Mia Khalifa et al., mobile-phones have become the most preferred pathway for cyber-criminals, who are clearly sending millions (if not billions) of such messages every day to the gullible.
When we refer to “cyber” criminal, the image that we have is that of an IIT-dropout Wizkid frantically typing away on a keyboard with multiple screens before him thanks to Holly and Bollywood.
But do the senders of the above cited messages look like that?
No. Most of them are semi-literate kids sitting in small rented rooms in crowed streets, very often in tier 2 or 3 town with nothing more than a few phones.
And are most of these crimes really “cyber”?
A more resounding no, and that is what we need to understand if we want to stop these crimes instead of blaming the Indian police for being inefficient when it comes to dealing with new-age crimes involving what we imagine to be high-tech. ..
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