Nuh, the cybercrime hub

As cops crack down on this Jamtara, awareness is the key

Photo for representational purpose only. - File photo

WITH cyber cops converging on Nuh in Haryana, which has earned the notoriety of being the country’s next Jamtara, there is hope that this cybercrime hub will be busted soon and victims of online swindling given justice. Foxed for months, the police finally traced thousands of cybercrimes worth crores of rupees to Nuh villages, cradled in the Aravallis. The hills had, till then, afforded the fraudsters a degree of security as they made the finding of mobile call locations difficult. Investigations into the online rackets run by hundreds of Nuh villagers reveal a duplication of the pattern made familiar by the OTT series, ‘Jamtara’, based on this Jharkhand district’s almost illiterate youngsters’ expertise via mobile phones to trick gullible people into revealing bank account/OTP details and then cheating them of thousands of rupees

Perhaps, the operations have become more ‘organised’ as many people in Nuh are seen scrambling to get a share of the pie. It is exemplified by the fact that fields having good Internet reception are being ‘rented’ to cheats for their nefarious activities. While some are experts in making fake Aadhaar and PAN cards to procure fake SIMs from faraway places, other gangs resort to the whole spectrum of swindling — from phishing, used auto purchases, honey-trapping, account hacking, social media hacking, online card cloning and digital locker hacking to tampering with ID cards. While law enforcers are on the job to annihilate this crime epicentre — as they did in Jamtara — it should be a lesson for everyone to be always alert, suspicious and wary of sharing financial and digital details with any stranger, no matter how convincing s/he may look or sound. If still defrauded, report immediately.

As the con artists are seemingly one step ahead in hacking their way through multiple safety walls put up for online transactions, awareness is the key to controlling the spiralling rise of cybercrimes. Statistics point to there being many more Jamtaras and Nuhs: As per CERT-In, the agency dealing with cyber security threats, cybercrimes increased seven times between 2018 and 2021 and just the first two months of 2022 reported more such offences than the whole of 2018.