SHILLONG: The Cyber Crime Police Station (CCPS), which was inaugurated last April, has made no significant achievement and the results of its investigations are not encouraging.
Sources said on Sunday that the police station under the cyber crime wing of CID, where citizens can complain of cyber-related cases, has made no major breakthrough in any of the cases already taken up by the police.
An official source admitted that there are not many IT experts in the police department to deal with cyber crime and often cases are handled by investigation officers who do not have the required qualification to probe them, the official added.
There is a need to have an expert team to go into the several cases which have piled up in the State, the official said.
A case in point is that after the email account of a person in the city was hacked, no progress was made into the case and finally the person who filed an FIR was politely asked to withdraw the case by the police and finally the case was closed.
Recently, a spurt in cases of cyber crime was reported and citizens are being duped of huge sum of money daily. There are also instances where police are reluctant to register cases related to the IT Act as these need to be investigated by an officer at the rank of inspector or above and most inspectors are not in the knowhow of how to go about such cases.
A police officer admitted that such cases are registered under the IPC sections. Till date, the number of arrests is only a few.
Cyber crimes are mostly committed by persons who are from outside the State and they are mostly from Delhi, Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Dhanbad and Jamtara districts in Jharkhand and Bangalore to name a few.
Besides having knowledge about the ever-changing internet world, another advantage for the criminals is that the servers of most of the social media like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and others, besides search engines like Google and Yahoo, are located outside India in countries like the US and Ireland. The policy of these giant companies is such that they do not share information and hence proper investigation becomes difficult.
The cyber crimes mostly include frauds related to ATM, insurance, e-mail, matrimonial, fake Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Sources said the State Government should set up cyber crime wings at least in the Eastern and the Western ranges (Shillong and Tura) to be assisted by CCPS as these are the areas targeted by cyber criminals.
No breakthrough has been achieved in the recent case of fake Twitter account of Chief Minister Mukul Sangma where the fake account holder had posted, “If I win elections, I will legalise weed (marijuana) in Shillong.”
Since the State is going to polls early next year, similar such attempts may be made by the cyber criminals to tarnish the image of the politicians.
In the past, few officers, including inspectors D.B Lamare and B.K Mishra, were successful in tackling cyber cases.
Sources added that it is high time that the State police have a pool of officers dedicated to investigation of cyber crimes.
