Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Till 2022, cyber crooks caught by the Bhopal district cyber crime cell had their roots to just two foreign countries—China and Pakistan. The trend has, however, expanded to other countries too, where the kingpins of the cyber crime gangs have been eyeing India to dupe people of their hard-earned money. The officials at the cyber crime cell said that almost 45% of the cyber fraudsters arrested in 2023, who had connections overseas, were working for kingpins based in countries such as Thailand, Romania, Australia and Canada.
The overseas-based gangs have taken to duping the people by means of third-party applications and after numerous advisories were issued with regard to the screen sharing application named ‘AnyDesk’, the crooks have come up with another such application to access people’s bank account details, which is named SplashTop, the officials added. With the help of the application, the local crooks working for the overseas gangs dupe people, either on the pretext of parcel fraud or various other frauds, which require screen sharing.
The senior officials of the cyber wing said that with a rise in awareness among people regarding sextortion, UPI, OTP and banking frauds, the screen-sharing frauds by means of third-party apps seem to be the easiest way for crooks to swindle money. The data provided by the cyber crime cell revealed that Bhopalites lost a total of Rs 10 crore to third-party app frauds in 2023.
Not only Madhya Pradesh, but the local agents recruited by the cyber crime kingpins are active in several other states too, including Haryana, Telangana, Punjab and Maharashtra etc. The gangs remain connected to each other over WhatsApp voice calls as the conversations are end-to-end encrypted. Box-1: Majority of Nigerians in Bhopal involved in frauds: Addl DCP (Crime) Additional deputy commissioner of police (Crime) Shailendra Singh Chouhan said that a majority of Nigerians residing in Bhopal also indulge in cyber frauds and later fly to their native country after playing clever on people.
