Government strict on digital arrest scam, lakhs of SIMs and fake ID blocks
New Delhi| Amidst the increase in digital arrest scams in the country, the government has started cracking down on scammers.
According to the report given by the police officers, more than 6.69 lakh SIM cards and 1,32,000 IMEI numbers have been blocked.
Minister of State for Home Bandi Sanjay Kumar, in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, said that the Central Government has taken several steps to strengthen the mechanism to better deal with digital arrests and other cyber crimes.
Ministry of Home Affairs has established ‘Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center’ (I4 C) to deal with all types of cyber crimes in the country. ‘Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System’ under I4 C was introduced in 2021 to prevent immediate reporting of financial fraud and misappropriation of funds by cybercriminals.
The Union Minister informed that so far financial amount of more than Rs 3,431 crore has been saved in more than 9.94 lakh complaints. He further said that the government and telecom service providers have devised a system to identify and block international calls coming from fake Indian numbers.
“Recently international fake calls have been made by cyber criminals in cases of fake digital arrests, FedEx scams, calls as government and police officers, etc” Kumar said. Instructions have also been issued to telecom service providers to block such incoming international fake calls.
A Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC) has been set up at I4 C, where representatives of major banks, financial intermediaries, payment aggregators, TSPs, IT intermediaries and law enforcement agencies of States/UTs are working together for immediate action and cooperation to combat cybercrime. In cooperation with banks and financial institutions I4 C has also launched a suspect registry of those who identify cybercriminals.
The government has also introduced a new feature named ‘Report & Check Suspect’, which gives citizens the option to search I4C’s collection of cybercriminals identifiers via ‘Suspect Search’.
