New Delhi: Telangana, Karnataka and Maharashtra are the top three states in the country registering a maximum number of cybercrime cases in the last three years with the Central government adopting a 13-pronged strategy to curb cybercrimes. According to the government data presented in Parliament on Thursday, Telangana with 30,596 cases registered between 2020 and 22 became the number one state in witnessing maximum cybercrime cases, followed by Karnataka with 31,433 and Maharashtra with 19,307 cybercrime cases registered during the same period.
Although the law enforcement agencies registered several cases against people involved in this crime, the number of convictions is very poor.
Maharashtra registered 5,912 cases between 2020 and 23 whereas only 45 persons were convicted; Telangana registered 19,900 whereas only 253 persons were convicted. On the other hand, only six cases were registered in Karnataka whereas the conviction number is nil. In Maharashtra, 1,204 persons were arrested whereas in Telangana 3,055 were arrested and in Karnataka, only three people involved with the cybercrime were arrested.
The ‘Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System’, under I4C, was launched in 2021 for immediate reporting of financial frauds and to stop siphoning off funds by fraudsters.
According to government data presented in Parliament, over Rs 3,431 crore has been saved across more than 9.94 lakh complaints till date.
Disclosing details about the Central government’s initiative in its fight against cybercrime, Minister of State for Home Bandi Sanjay Kumar said that ‘Police’ and ‘Public Order’ are state subjects.
“The states and UTs are primarily responsible for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of crimes, including cybercrime through their law enforcement agencies. The Central Government supplements the initiatives of the states and UTs through advisories and financial assistance under various schemes for capacity building of their LEAs,” he said.
He informed that a toll-free Helpline number ‘1930’ has been operationalised to provide assistance in lodging online cyber complaints.
He said that the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platform, namely ‘CyTrain’ portal has been developed under I4C, for capacity building of police officers and judicial officers through online courses on critical aspects of cybercrime investigation, forensics and prosecution.
“More than 98,698 police officers from states and UTs are registered and more than 75,591 certificates issued through the portal,” Kumar said.
He said that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has set up the National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) to generate situational awareness of cyber security threats by scanning the entire Indian cyberspace metadata to generate near-real-time information to enable proactive, preventive and protective actions by all relevant entities across the Indian cyberspace.
He further said that a state-of-the-art centre, Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC) has been established at I4C where representatives of major banks, financial intermediaries, payment aggregators, telecom service providers, IT intermediaries and representatives of States and UTs law enforcement agencies are working together for immediate action and seamless cooperation to tackle cybercrime.
Read more: India Registers 14,41,717 Cybercrime Cases From January 1 To November 11
