When the country faces an onslaught of cyber crimes and most of it does not make any headway from the investigation point of view, leave aside arrests and seizures, then busting of a cyber fraud syndicate is certainly worth taking note of. India’s premier investigative agency CBI recently busted Noida cyber fraud syndicate. This happened as a part of Chakra-V, the Central Bureau of Investigation busted a sophisticated cyber crime syndicate that was allegedly duping citizens of UK and Australia through tech support scams.
The prominent nature of scams all of us are aware of now that primarily revolves around investment, jobs, loans, digital arrest and the like, based on social engineering and playing on fear and greed which they are able to incite in the victims.According to the CBI, the fraudsters posed as technical support representatives of reputed global companies like Microsoft. What was the actual operandi? Gullibility of Indians is getting legendary given the ease with which they are falling prey to the cyber crooks.
Deviating a little from the already practiced modus operandis, these cyber crooks would inform the unsuspecting individuals that their computers have been compromised. Having successfully created that scare, then they would extort money under the pretext of fixing fabricated technical issues. In the present instance, credible information was critical to uncovering this case. Based on this nature of information, CBI registered a case to investigate the syndicate’s fraudulent activities. In a coordinated raid on July 7, searches were conducted at three locations in Noida, including a fully functional fake call centre.
The fake call centre ironically was located within the Noida Special Economic Zone. What is most fascinating is that this was one of the few operations of this nature that was conducted in close coordination with international agencies, including the FBI (USA), the National Crime Agency (UK), and the Microsoft Corporation. The investigators were able to lay their hands on a large cache of digital evidence. The busted call centre, FirstIdea, reportedly operated with high-end technology of masking their identities, targeting a large number of foreign victims while avoiding local detection.
GLOBAL COLLABORATION FOR COMBATING CYBER CRIMES IS A MUST TO MAKE ANY WORTHWHILE IMPACT.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.