Patna: Rising cases of cyber and social media crimes have alerted Bihar Police's Economic Offences Unit (EOU), which has now decided to establish Cyber Crime and Social Media Unit (CCSMU) to help tackle and crack them.

The units will be opened in all 40 police districts, including Bettiah and Naugachhia.

They will function with their gadgets and experts to support the regular police force, which do not have the skills required to investigate cyber crimes.

Each of the units will have a separate set-up with four computers, two laptops, call details record analyser, various gadgets and softwares to help in mobile forensics. The state government has already purchased them.

Economic Offences Unit additional superintendent of police (ASP) Sushil Kumar said: "We received 333 cases related to cyber crime in 2017. Such cases are rising with the increase in online financial transactions, which made us feel the need to have Cyber Crime and Social Media Unit in all the districts to help tackle them."

The money for the units is coming from the Nirbhaya Fund constituted in the aftermath of the gang-rape of a student in Delhi that had triggered outrage across the country to implement initiatives to enhance the safety of women and girls. The corpus now stands at Rs 3,100 crore.

"The Centre has released around Rs 82 crore of which we have got around Rs 3 crore so far to establish Cyber Crime and Social Media Unit. The units will go a long way in countering cyber and social media crimes," Sushil added.

The EOU is training police personnel from various districts with the help of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing on tackling cyber crimes through a 56-hour course. Some of the trained personnel will be selected and sent outside the state to be developed as master trainers.

The EOU has also established its own cyber crime investigation and training centre, with a full-fledged lab to crack information technology-related crimes. The centre has its own premises.

An official said the EOU is also getting around 8,000sqft space at the new police headquarters being readied in Patna, where senior officials of the unit will have their offices.