Kolkata: Lack of proper technical knowledge often makes the cops handicapped in tackling cyber crimes as the fraudsters are most of the time way ahead of the cops in this area of cyber expertise.
To meet up this gap, the Kolkata Police has now started special cyber training for the police personnel involving cyber experts and professors from reputed technological institutions. Special workshops are conducted at the city police headquarter at Lalbazar in central Kolkata.
Till now the city police had been conducting awareness drives through social media by referring to popular scenes in different movies. However, the top brass of city police has realized unless the force’s personnel are equipped with sufficient cyber-knowledge it would be impossible to resist these super tech-savvy fraudsters.
Already these special training workshops are being conducted at the city police headquarters twice a week. “The initial batch consists of the officer-in-charge and additional officer-in-charge of the different police stations. In the next phases, select sub-inspectors and assistant sub-inspector from different police stations will attend these workshops,” said a top official of the city police who did not wish to be named.
According to city police sources, after any amount of money is transferred from an account to any online money wallet, the actual transfer takes some time to happen. “So the focus is how to stop that money transfer within that interim period by tracking the wallet where the money has been transferred. The training is being given by independent cyber experts, professors from reputed technological institutions, and in some cases some top officials of the city police, who are themselves, cyber experts,” said the city police official.
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The new city police commissioner Vineet Kumar Goyal, who is himself an alumnus from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, has already instructed his team to be especially vigilant about controlling cybercrime. In fact, conducting these special training workshops was his brainchild as he felt that without proper training the cops will not be able to match the cyber expertise of the fraudsters.
However, the top officials of the city police are maintaining secrecy on the details of the training. However, it is learned that in these workshops more focus is being given to practical training than theoretical training. Once the training process is completed there will be mini cyber cells in every police station beside the regular cyber cell at the city police headquarter. There will also be division-based cyber cells also. The entire idea is the decentralization of the cybercrime division of the city police.
