Mumbai leads in web offences
India’s financial capital tops among the metropolitan cities where the maximum number of cyber cases registered in 2016, as per the data released by National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) on Thursday.
Total 980 cyber cases were registered under IT Act as well as Indian Penal Code (IPC) in Mumbai during 2016 which is followed by Bengaluru and Jaipur where 762 and 532 cyber crime cases were registered last year respectively, the data reveals.
Out of 980 cases in Mumbai, the cases registered under sections of IPC were 950 and 24 cases were registered under IT Act. Rest of the six cases were registered under Special and Local Laws (SLL).
The cases under cybercrime registered last year in Mumbai accounts 23.5 percent of the total 4,172 cyber crime cases registered across India.
Cyber expert Vijay Mukhi said, “People like me do not get surprised with these numbers. The highest number of cyber cases in Mumbai was expected because Mumbai is the financial capital of India. So the hackers will obviously be there to target people having more money. And for some reason we don’t catch the hackers and cyber criminals to put them immediately into the jails. So this data will keep increasing with the years.”
In a bid to combat the burgeoning threat of cyber crime, Mumbai police have recently taken a powerpacked initiative to train its officers. At least six officers from each police station are being trained at its Cyber Cell in Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). The trained officers have been kept away from investigating the routine crimes and routine bandobast.
“The training of our officers is helping us in expediting the detection of cyber crime. Our aim is to enhance the conviction rate too,” said a senior IPS officer.
Another cyber expert Prashant Mali said, “It is good that the police officers are being trained specially to investigate with cyber crime cases. But what if these trained officers are transferred? Mumbai is a financial capital, where the cyber threat looms large.”
The Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Akbar Pathan did not reveal the number of cyber crime cases registered in 2017 but added, “The cyber crime cases registered in 2017 is lower than last year. The majority of cyber crime cases registered this year is of vishing crime, cyber fraud, etc.”
The top ten metropolitan cities where the cyber crime cases were registered include Mumbai (980), Bengaluru (762), Jaipur (532), Lucknow (361), Hyderabad (291), Pune (269), Kolkata (168), Patna (167), Nagpur (97) and Delhi (90).