To curb the white collar crime in the Capital, the Delhi Police has asked the telecom companies to send awareness messages to their all its customers.
Following the direction of the Delhi police, the telecom companies have started warning its customers -- asking them not to respond to missed calls or calls from unknown international numbers with prefix other than + 91 - or SMS about winning prizes and lottery -- as these may be fraudulent calls. The latest statistics provided by the Delhi Police reveal that 1,026 cheating cases have been registered from January 1 to May 31 this year while 2,055 cases were reported in 2012.
Officers said that blue collar crimes, such as murder, extortion, robbery may be traditional, but there was a sudden rise in white collar crimes, especially property and bank fraud in the last three years. The profit earned in just four fraud cases here would be equivalent to the value of all the items stolen in the city in a year.
"As many as 1,990 cases were reported in 2011 across 178 police stations, as compared to 1,845 cases in 2010. Data provided by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) shows that 101 cases were reported till June 20, 2013, while 120 cases were reported in 2012. In 2011, 147 cases were reported, as compared to 148 in 2010," the officer added.
A senior Crime Branch officer said that cheating, forgery and criminal breach of trust cases are rising in the Capital. In most of the cases, cheaters sent SMSes to the customers claiming that 'the mobile phone numbers had won cash prize worth of Rs 1 lakh or Rs 1 crore'. When the gullible customer enquired about the SMS, they would also ask him to deposit a certain amount of money in the bank to claim the 'prize money' on various pretexts.
"Recently, we had a meeting with top officials of telecom companies where we asked them to send awareness messages to their customers not to believe such messages and fall into the trap of cheaters," said Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime & Railways), Ravindra Yadav.
A police officer, tasked with investigation of such cases, said that during investigation they noticed that in many cases the messages were sent from forged number which investigators could not trace.
"In one of the cases, after procuring a mobile phone connection through fake identity card, a Nigerian national called Indian people and duped several customers in the same modus operandi," the officer added.