6Ritu Chatterjee (name changed) lost Rs 40,000 after the LCD monitor she had purchased online was never delivered

6Madhurika Banerjee (name changed) was bothered with obscene SMS texts and telephone calls after a fake account in her name was created on popular social networking website Orkut

The Internet boon has become a bane for many.

The wide world of the web is teeming with criminals who set up counterfeit banking or airline websites that look exactly like the originals (pharming), send emails from seemingly trustworthy addresses requesting sensitive information (phishing) and perpetrate various other online offences.

“The number of cyber crime complaints is increasing by the day, but it’s still far less than in other cities. Most victims don’t lodge a complaint. Some others don’t even realise that they have been cheated. We get about 15 cases a year,” said Ajoy Kumar, the deputy commissioner (I) of the detective department.

According to the police, the biggest problem is lack of awareness, especially in view of greater sophistication in the methods of online identity theft and other cyber crimes committed from California to Calcutta.

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission received about a quarter million identity theft complaints last year. The number of such complaints that trickle into the cyber crime cell in the city is about 60 annually but the victims follow up hardly 12 to 15 of them.

“Viruses are not the only threat online. Therefore, computer security is not just a question of using an anti-virus. A number of computer users are vulnerable to attacks by cyber criminals,” said Phil Hickey, the consumer product marketing manager of Symantec, a software security solutions company.

Credit card fraud is one of the commonest offences online. The rise in its number is alarming because the victims realise they have been duped only after getting their card statements. Recently, a call centre worker in Calcutta used the credit card details of a client to make online purchases from her home computer. In another case, products were being sold on the Internet using fake logos of a prominent hotel in the city.

“The count of cyber crime cases has gone up 81 per cent across the globe in the past six months. In India, 76 per cent of the emails are spam, which is higher than the world average of 56 per cent,” said Hickey.

The latest versions of the three major Internet browser programmes — Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera — contain protection against phishing. Symantec has come up with Norton 360, which provides all-round protection against cyber crime in the form of anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, intrusion protection, anti-phishing protection, backup and tune-up.

But despite all the measures, it is getting harder to bring the cyber criminals to book. “Sometimes the offenders are knowledgeable enough to destroy the cyber evidence, which makes the task of catching them even more difficult,” said Kumar.

This also means that recovery has become very difficult. For example, in the US, the percentage of recovery has gone down from 87 per cent in 2005 to 61 per cent in 2006.

“We can recover the stolen amount if we can catch the criminals. But if the criminals are not caught, it is hard to recover the money,” said deputy commissioner Kumar.