Cuttack, Sept. 6: In a classic example of spurt in cases of online and hi-tech fraud in the twin cities of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, police commissioner B.K. Sharma himself claimed to have been frequently receiving “lottery winning” text messages on his mobile phone. The text messages mentioned he had ‘won’ a large sum in lottery and asked him to submit his contact and bank details.

The police commissioner narrated his story of receiving fraud messages while speaking at a workshop Bank Frauds: Prevention and Investigation, jointly organised by ICICI Bank and the city police.

At the workshop, he also said that the city police plan to come up with a new mechanism to deal with cyber crimes and economic offences. He emphasised on adopting new technologies to control emerging kinds of online fraud.

With the country’s banking sector going hi-tech, there has been a significant rise in cases of online fraud everywhere. The twin cities of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar have not also been spared of the rising cases of e-mail cheating and texting.

“We are contemplating coming up with a mechanism so that bank frauds and other cyber crimes can be handled at the police station level. There is a need to train police inspectors and officials of different ranks to investigate such cases,” said the police commissioner.

Sharma said there were a number of cases of e-mail cheating and other lottery scams in which gullible people were getting trapped.

Two years ago, a person had committed suicide in Bhubaneswar after falling prey to such a case of online lottery scam. The person, who was a resident of Bapujinagar, had committed suicide after he lost around Rs 30 lakh in an email lottery scam in August 2009.

Technological back up for cyber crime investigation is getting updated across the world depending on the trends of such crimes. There is a need for procurement of new software and training of officials. But these facilities are not available with government-backed systems in Bhubaneswar.

Citing the example of e-mail threats to chief minister Naveen Patnaik, Sharma said there was a time when the officials had been groping in dark, as the sender had used a proxy server. Later, it was tracked to an eastern European country.

There was a need for continuous upgrade of both software and officers’ training and a dedicated investigating unit for the purpose, Sharma added.

Senior police officials said today’s workshop would help in investigation of cyber crimes and other bank frauds as a number of case studies were discussed which could be helpful.