Case Study on Email Crime
You might have often look or heard from your colleagues, relatives, or anyone about scams, money frauds, ransom any such cases. Email is the only link in between them where people might ignore the email headers, from where it came from, who sends it. If the mail contains some text like:
“Hello ABC, You have won a wonderful cash prize of Rs. 50,000. To receive it, you need to enter your details”. Such mails develop an interest among people and in excitement they go and fill their details.
They even might not know what will happen next? These scams or frauds are not from today but from years ago. In March 2016, a lottery case was registered at CID of Bengaluru, where a 65 yr old lady got bankrupt with an amount of Rs. 38 lakh of her retirement money. The woman received a text message on her phone in December last informing her that she was the winner of an online lottery floated by a well-known mobile phone company. Not realizing that this was a scam, the woman thought she was going to pocket five million pounds, as promised. Not only this lady but also from all over the Bengaluru city nearly Rs. 5 crores have lost in such scam.
The root cause of scams, frauds, or phishing attacks is just “Human Error”. I quoted this because it’s the only cause due to which scammers get evolved day by day with more techniques and they do their work. We humans have to understand the law of privacy, understand the standard protocols of how and what to behave, we must also see that our privacy with security is not dependable on anyone neither your close ones too.
There is again a popular scam “Job Scam” in India where they are targeting the young bachelors in demand of jobs in MNCs. A case filed in Delhi by Shipra Singh, a 22-year-old postgraduate in Commerce from Noida read on Instagram that Thailand-based ‘Yo Air’ airline was hiring for cabin crew. After the initial interaction, she was asked to appear for an interview at a hotel near Bangla Sahib Gurudwara. When asked to submit a demand draft of Rs 2.5 lakhs, Shipra suspected foul play. “As many as 250 aspirants including me had assembled at the hotel for the interview and all of us were asked to submit the money before any selection procedure would begin,” said Shipra.
When the hotel management informed the police, it turned out the interviews were part of a fake job racket run by Mumbai resident Sanket Jha. Jha was subsequently arrested. During investigations, it was revealed that no airline with such a name existed.
Such scams happen today, which is never the less dangerous attack on young minds and careers. As an Indian citizen where this campaign of Digital India is going on, we must also look forward to “Digital India, Safe India”. We must ensure about everything which we are part of social media, emails, hangout, etc. There are other scams too which are getting evolved like Power Bank Scams, Oxygen Concentrator, Voucher Scams, Wealth Billion Scams. In this pandemic situation, most of the cases are registered across India are of bank frauds which have risen to 8700 cases in 2020 and 7400 in 2021 to date.
When we look forward to work on Human Errors despite being a victim and blaming ourselves for such crimes, just take a step to learn about security, awareness and try to help others who may be the victim of such scams. Then and then only such crimes would get reduced. So, it’s our concern whether to get trapped in such crimes and be a victim of blaming ourselves or to be the person having knowledge and awareness of such crimes.
References of Cases in India:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1012729/india-number-of-bank-fraud-cases/
