Indian Police Success Story: Fight against a crime by reporting it

New Delhi [India], Dec. 21 (ANI): Indian police recently arrested eight suspects in a phone scam operation that is estimated to have cost victims millions of dollars. Kaspersky Lab said in a press release that it welcomes the announcement by the Indian Police (Cyber Crime Investigation Cell, CID, West Bengal) of significant progress in its investigation into a scam, which involved people being called by fraudulent technical support staff. The scam was uncovered in 2012 by a Kaspersky Lab Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) expert, and reported to the Indian Police. The phone scammers operated by calling random individuals and posing as representatives of a large, well-known consumer technology vendor. Targets were told that their computers had been infected with an unverified software license, rendering their machines insecure. The fraudsters offered to help by connecting remotely to the victim's device to supposedly fix and install updated software, forcing them to pay a subscription fee of at least USD 250 for "life-time support", "life-time updates", "anti-hacker solution", etc. In 2012, David Jacoby, a Senior Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab, received calls on his home phone from scammers who were pursuing him as a potential victim. Jacoby, fed up of the repeated calls, played along, allowing the criminals to connect to his computer while he kept a virtual machine running, and convincing them to visit a website he had set up. All this helped David to capture the network traffic and to find out the IP address, email address and phone numbers of the criminals. It turned out that they were calling from India. The data Jacoby collected was substantial and has now helped the police to locate and hunt down the criminals. "While India is regarded as an IT power, it has also become a favored hub for cybercriminals in the APAC region. We face many challenges dealing with cybercrimes, but our cooperation with key experts such as Kaspersky Lab helps to strengthen our cyber-capabilities," said Rajshri Banerjee, Inspector in-charge, Cyber Crime Investigation Cell, CID, West Bengal. (ANI)