Visakhapatnam: At a time when the police in other states are launching their official Facebook pages in order to spread awareness about various kinds of cyber crimes, AP cops are lagging behind others even on the most popular social networking sites, despite Vizag emerging as the cyber capital in the state and standing second in cyber crimes in the entire country.
The AP State Police data says that a total of 308 cyber crimes, including online bank frauds, job rackets, e-mail hacking, data theft, online-lottery frauds, Vishing and Phishing and few other white-collar crimes were reported in Vizag and Vijayawada in 2015 and Vizag stood in the top place with 267 cases.
Over 1,000 cases were reported with cyber crime investigation cell (CCIC), Vizag, since 2010 and over 570 cases are still under investigation. Over 282 cyber criminals were arrested and 75 convicted.
“The criminals have been turning increasingly tech savvy and come up with new means of duping people in Vizag and other parts in the state. But, our police are yet to go online to spread cyber crime awareness,” says K Siva Kumar, a software professional in Vizag.
Sources said that in other states the cops regularly post the latest trends in cyber crimes, alert people about various offences on their Facebook page to sensitise citizens about the tendency of the crimes.
Though Vizag cops have launched their official website vizag-citypolice.gov.in a few days back, the cops have failed to post the most modern cyber crimes on the website and the netizens have no option to post their doubts and grievances on cyber crimes to seek advice from the police through the website.
A senior police officer said that unveiling a page on Facebook is a not a hard-hitting task for the police department but who will regularly update the page, post alerts and respond and reply to netizens’ feedback is a big question as the police department is short of tech-savvy personnel, he added.
The AP police are still ill-equipped in terms of manpower and technology to deal the rising cyber crimes cases and nab the cyber criminals. At least, the police must go online to create awareness among netizens to prevent the crimes as facebook and whatsapp are the craziest and powerful social media, opined the victims in the cyber crimes.
The increasing rate of cyber crimes in Vizag should ring an alarm bell to the police and they should do the needful for the citizens.
