City police take effective step to control cybercrimes

Visakhapatnam: The coronavirus pandemic has not only affected the health of the people but also taken a toll on their psychological wellbeing. Following the long spells of psychological stress, there is an apparent rise in the crime rate in the port city. And bringing down the rising graph of the crime rate has become a challenging task for the city police.

As the department's surveillance alone would not give way to desired results, the city police have decided to take the weight of sensitising people on curbing drug menace and bringing down cybercrimes by bringing students on board. In line with this, the police department intends to lay a larger focus on sensitising the public, initiating awareness campaigns through students from various educational institutions.

Earlier, schools, colleges and universities were frequented to educate students on traffic discipline. Now, with cybercrimes compounding at a faster pace than ever and youths falling prey to them most of the time, the city police intend to reach out to them through a special drive. The prime focus of the endeavour is centred on two aspects – preventing cybercrime rate and controlling the drug menace. The recent statistics as indicated in the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)-2021 report, Andhra Pradesh, has seen a significant increase in the number of cases registered under the economic offences and environment related.

In Visakhapatnam city, 201 cybercrime cases were reported in 2018, 369 in 2019, 355 in 2020, 316 in 2021 and about 1,600 in 2022 thus far. Sharing details with The Hans India, City Commissioner of Police CH. Srikanth says, "As far as cybercrime is concerned, the scope for property recovery is very thin. Hence there is a larger need to make sure that people do not fall into the trap of cyber fraudsters."

Although some of the cybercrime victims turn out to be less educated, a majority of them happen to be highly qualified and relatively from well-off families. For the police, controlling the rising cybercrime rate has become an arduous task as tracking the crime's origin along with its network is indeed a time-consuming exercise. "There is a higher scope for cyber fraudsters being located anywhere across the world. Tracing them, recovering the lost property is not that easy," reasons the Commissioner of Police, adding that a lot of procedure goes into crossing borders when it comes to tracing cyber fraudsters operating from distant locations, especially overseas destinations.

As prevention is the key, the city police have taken the onus of sensitising communities to control cybercrime rate as well as curb the drug menace to a considerable extent and bringing out effective changes among people.