Detectives in demand to nab cyber criminals

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Several detective agencies in the city are now chasing servers and fake ids more than cheating husbands and scheming wives. As lives move online, crime follows, but now it has started trickling down to the local level, making people seek help of the hushed and trusted private detectives.
Mahesh Parekh, who owns Argus Risk Intelligence and Management Private Limited says that most cases coming their way involve hacking of social networking profiles and posting of information to malign someone’s (mostly a girl’s) reputation. “A lot of profiles get hacked with phone numbers and other sensitive information being posted online, sometimes even posing the girl as a prostitute. And mostly it is done with the intent of seeking revenge. So, we try and figure out the id by surveillance methods and cross the id,” he says.
While most relationship guides will tell you it’s okay to click intimate pictures of you and your partner, they will also warn you against storing them. But somehow people always tend to forget the latter part and go ahead storing them in email accounts. Ajit Singh of Hartfield Detective Agency tells us of one such case. “There was a couple, where a man well in his 50s was going out with a young girl. She suddenly started receiving mails threatening about semi-nude pictures she had stored online for her partner, and the sender was asking for a lot of money as ransom,” he says.
Explaining the investigation process he says that they used computer experts and discovered that a German server was being used to send the mails from a Yahoo id. While they managed to get that id blocked, mails started coming in from a Hotmail account. “We soon knew that the sender had lost most of the explicit pictures as they were in the blocked account,” adding that finally the offender was nabbed somewhere near Delhi, when the man finally decided to meet him to extract the rest of the photos.
A lot of financial crimes are also being undertaken by private eyes for the wronged party fears getting into murky waters. S.K. Kaushik talks about an incident where a bank got involved in an ATM pin scandal. “An employee of the bank had created a fake home page and was asking people to fill in information regarding their bank accounts including secret pin numbers. We discovered that a proxy server was being used and with the help of a surveillance team, nabbed the culprit,” he says.
Ankit Fadia, who is credited with being world’s first ethical hacker and has helped provide valuable clues for both 9/11 and Mumbai terror cases says a lot of heartburn can be avoided if one uses simple tips for cyber protection. “Installing a firewall and anti-virus on your computer and avoiding the use of public computers for financial matters are simple things that can protect people from cyber crimes,” he says.