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Since 2020, nearly 1.27 lakh gullible Gujaratis have lost Rs 814.81 crore of their hard-earned money and life savings in a blink - this comes to 115 victims a day or five an hour.
In the past three years, the CID Cyber Crime unit has reported 30,019 mobile numbers used by scammers to the Department of Telecom (DoT) to be blocked - this comes to 27 mobile numbers a day or one every hour.
So, for every five people conned in an hour, only one 'fraud' mobile number is blocked, making controlling cybercrime a Sisyphean challenge.
Most of these numbers are registered in Mewat, Alwar, Bharatpur, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Nadia and rural areas of West Bengal, according to CID crime officials.
During the pandemic year, 2020, 23,055 complaints were lodged by citizens on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCCRP) helpline '1930' and various state police stations - the quantum of financial fraud involved was Rs 95.29 crore.
The following year, the number of complaints increased to 28,908 and the frauds amounted to Rs 366.88 crore. In 2022, however, complaints more than doubled to 66,997, and the frauds amounted to Rs 306.4 crore.
The biggest challenge for the police has been the existing legislation that does not categorize the acts of cyber financial frauds as a separate offence.
That explains why only a few FIRs are registered. According to the 2020 and 2021 reports of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), only 583 and 783 FIRs of cyber frauds respectively were lodged in those years - most of these involved phone scammers.
In the first 34 days of 2023, Gujarat lost Rs 1.37cr each day to cybercrooks; in 2022, the corresponding figure was Rs 83.94 lakh and the previous year, a little above Rs 1 crore.
Additional DGP, CID (Crime and Railways), RB Brahmbhatt, said that awareness among people is the only way to prevent cybercrime.
He said that the state police have been constantly spreading awareness about cybercrime cases but these have been taking place relentlessly.