The Haryana Police’s Crime Branch has prepared a list of 27,824 mobile numbers that were used to commit cyber-frauds in the state. The numbers will be blocked and the IMEI numbers of the handsets on which they were used will be analyzed.
Additional DGP (Crime) OP Singh has, in a letter, asked all senior police officers to ensure that owners of the handsets, on which these numbers were functional, be questioned to find out the actual quantum of the cyber-frauds happening across Haryana.
“CyberSafe Portal is run by I4C (Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center) MHA. It blocks mobile numbers uploaded by designated district Cybercrime Nodal officer. You are hereby directed to upload the numbers… for blocking… You are also directed to carry out IMEI linkage analysis through the mobile handset being used to operate above numbers, find out other mobile numbers being used in the handset and upload these numbers too on CyberSafe for their blocking. The action taken report be sent to the state nodal officer, State Crime Branch…,” Singh wrote to the senior police officers.
Talking to The Indian Express, Singh said, “In the last 10 months, over 1 lakh fraud calls have been received by the people in Haryana. The numbers could be more but people have complained about 1 lakh such calls on our cyber helpline number 1930”.
The Crime Branch has also compiled a district-wise list of such mobile phone numbers. Highest number of such mobile numbers were registered in Gurgaon (7142), followed by Faridabad (3896), Ambala (1101), Bhiwani (710), Charkhi Dadri (296), Fatehabad (419), Hansi (257), Hisar (1228) ), Jhajjar (1024), Jind (979), Kaithal (408), Karnal (958), Kurukshetra (593), Mahendragarh (611), Mewat (282), Palwal (602), Panchkula (1420), Panipat (1034 ), Rewari (805), Rohtak (1045), Sirsa (591), Sonipat (1408) and Yamunanagar (873). Remaining numbers were detected by Railway Police and Police Station (Cyber) State Crime Branch.
“These 27,824 mobile numbers were found to be criminally abused for cybercrime. There is a possibility that these miscreants must be using other mobile numbers on the same handsets, which we have asked the field units to detect so that all such unscrupulous people can be identified,” Singh added.
.