Case studies

1. A senior student in Dublin, Shane Fitzgerald placed a fake quote in www.wikipedia.org under a
famous dead musician, Maurice Jarre’s biography for his experiment study. To his surprise the
bogus quote was copied and paste in the obituary and articles about Jarre. Only a few weeks later
upon his admission that the writers found out that it was a hoax. Also, this brings up the social
responsibility of content providers in presenting reliable information.
2. Another case is the Missouri’s family Christmas card photo. The photo was published by the
wife in her personal Face book account and blog. To her surprise their family photo was then
edited and was used as an advertisement photo by Czech store without her or her husband’s
permission. The store owner thought the picture was computer generated and admitted the mistake.
3.Phishing Scams with Mail appearing to come from Genuine Website -Email could appear to
come from say ICICI Bank asking to verify account. On click user is taken to a webpage looking
exactly similar to ICICI website. User is asked to change password, submit mobile number etc . His
user Id, password, mobile number etc gets stolen. The criminals then logs into bank account and
transfersmoney.
4.State of Tamil Nadu Vs Suhas Katti - The Case of Suhas Katti is related to posting of obscene,
defamatory and annoying message about a divorcee woman in the yahoo message group. E-Mails
were also forwarded to the victim for information by the accused through a false e-mail account
opened by him in the name of the victim. The posting of the message resulted in annoying phone
calls to the lady in the belief that she was soliciting. Based on a complaint made by the victim in
February 2004, the Police traced the accused to Mumbai and arrested him within the next few days.
The accused was a known family friend of the victim and was reportedly interested in marrying
her. She however married another person. This marriage later ended in divorce and the accused
started contacting her once again. On her reluctance to marry him, the accused took up the
harassment through the Internet.
The Defence argued that the offending mails would have been given either by ex-husband of the
complainant or the complainant her self to implicate the accused as accused alleged to have turned
down the request of the complainant to marry her.
5.Pune Citibank MphasiS Call Center Fraud – in this scam the amount of US $ 3,50,000 from
accounts of four US customers were dishonestly transferred to bogus accounts. This will give a lot
of ammunition to those lobbying against outsourcing in US. Such cases happen all over the world
but when it happens in India it is a serious matter and we can not ignore it. It is a case of sourcing
engineering. Some employees gained the confidence of the customer and obtained their PIN
numbers to commit fraud. They got these under the guise of helping the customers out of difficult
situations. Highest security prevails in the call centers in India as they know that they will lose their
business. There was not as much of breach of security but of sourcing engineering.
All accounts were opened in Pune and the customers complained that the money from their
accounts was transferred to Pune accounts and that’s how the criminals were traced. Police has
been able to prove the honesty of the call center and has frozen the accounts where the money was
transferred.

6.Chandigarh, February 20 The Cyber Crime Investigations Cell of the Chandigarh Police’s Crime
Branch arrested one Jatinder Singh Marok, who works as a process executive with the IDS Infotech
Limited in Phase VIII, Mohali, on Wednesday on the charges of uploading an obscene profile of a
girl on the networking website, Orkut.

7.OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF MAHARASTRA GOVERNMENT HACKED -MUMBAI, 20

September 2007 — IT experts were trying yesterday to restore the official website of the
government of Maharashtra, which was hacked in the early hours of Tuesday.

Rakesh Maria, joint commissioner of police, said that the state’s IT officials lodged a formal
complaint with the Cyber Crime Branch police on Tuesday. He added that the hackers would be
tracked down. Yesterday the website, http://www.maharashtragovernment.in, remained
blocked.Deputy Chief Minister and Home Minister R.R. Patil confirmed that the Maharashtra
government website had been hacked. He added that the state government would seek the help of
IT and the Cyber Crime Branch to investigate the hacking.The state government website contains
detailed information about government departments, circulars, reports, and several other topics. IT
experts working on restoring the website told Arab News that they fear that the hackers may have
destroyed all of the website’s contents.According to sources, the hackers may be from Washington.
IT experts said that the hackers had identified themselves as “Hackers Cool Al-Jazeera” and
claimed they were based in Saudi Arabia. They added that this might be a red herring to throw
investigators off their trail.

According to a senior official from the state government’s IT department, the official website has
been affected by viruses on several occasions in the past, but was never hacked. The official added
that the website had no firewall

8.Three people held guilty in on line credit card scam - Customers credit card details were misused
through online means for booking air-tickets. These culprits were caught by the city Cyber Crime
Investigation Cell in pune. It is found that details misused were belonging to 100 people. Mr.
Parvesh Chauhan, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance officer had complained on behalf of one of his
customer. In this regard Mr. Sanjeet Mahavir Singh Lukkad, Dharmendra Bhika Kale and Ahmead
Sikandar Shaikh were arrested. Lukkad being employeed at a private institution, Kale was his
friend. Shaiklh was employed in one of the branches of State Bank of India .According to the
information provided by the police, one of the customer received a SMS based alert for purchasing
of the ticket even when the credit card was being held by him. Customer was alert and came to
know something was fishy; he enquired and came to know about the misuse. He contacted the
Bank in this regards. Police observed involvement of many Bank's in this reference. The tickets
were book through online means. Police requested for the log details and got the information of the
Private Institution. Investigation revealed that the details were obtained from State Bank of India .
Shaikh was working in the credit card department; due to this he had access to credit card details of
some customers. He gave that information to Kale. Kale in return passed this information to his
friend Lukkad. Using the information obtained from Kale Lukkad booked tickets. He used to sell
these tickets to customers and get money for the same. He had given few tickets to various other
institutions.

9.ONLINE CREDIT CARD FRAUD ON E-BAY

Bhubaneswar: Rourkela police busted a racket involving an online fraud worth Rs 12.5 lakh. The
modus operandi of the accused was to hack into the eBay India website and make purchases in the
names of credit cardholders. Two persons, including alleged mastermind Debasis Pandit, a BCA
student, were arrested and forwarded to the court of the subdivisional judicial magistrate, Rourkela.
The other arrested person is Rabi Narayan Sahu. Superintendent of police D.S. Kutty said the duo
was later remanded in judicial custody but four other persons allegedly involved in the racket were
untraceable. A case has been registered against the accused under Sections 420 and 34 of the Indian
Penal Code and Section 66 of the IT Act and further investigation is on, he said.While Pandit, son
of a retired employee of Rourkela Steel Plant, was arrested from his Sector VII residence last night,
Sahu, his associate and a constable, was nabbed at his house in Uditnagar.Pandit allegedly hacked
into the eBay India site and gathered the details of around 700 credit cardholders. He then made
purchases by using their passwords.he fraud came to the notice of eBay officials when it was
detected that several purchases were made from Rourkela while the customers were based in cities
such as Bangalore, Baroda and Jaipur and even London, said V. Naini, deputy manager of
eBay.The company brought the matter to the notice of Rourkela police after some customers
lodged complaints.Pandit used the address of Sahu for delivery of the purchased goods, said police.
The gang was involved in train, flight and hotel reservations.
The hand of one Satya Samal, recently arrested in Bangalore, is suspected in the crime. Samal had
booked a room in a Bangalore hotel for three months. The hotel and transport bills rose to Rs 5
lakh, which he did not pay.

Samal was arrested for non-payment of bills, following which Pandit rushed to Bangalore and
stood guarantor for his release on bail, police sources said.

10. there is also a case was happened with me , 1 month ago there I received a e-mail from a
address named - City link Courier service <courierservice_citylink@yahoo.com.hk>
, in this e-mail they send me that I have won of £480,000.00 GBP (Four Hundred and Eighty
Thousand Great British Pounds Sterling only) and please send your personal details to us , and our
officers are coming to give you your reward . and they have told that please deposit the
international duty rupees- 25,000 in the account .
More than 80 million people in India are actively using the Internet as a medium to inform, connect
and converse. The number of Internet subscribers is also growing at a very healthy rate each year.

Unfortunately, as the population of netizens in India grows, the number of cyber crimes grows too.
In fact, it is growing at an alarming rate as a recent report released by the National Crime Records
Bureau (NRCB) reveals the dark side of India’s Internet usage.

The following is the representation of the actual cases that were raised in India under the
Information Technology Act:

The number of cyber crimes has been increasing at a whopping 100% each year; a growing concern
for the e-commerce industry in India as people lose confidence in online shopping. Out of the top
countries in the world, China and India stand at 1st and 2nd position with the greatest number of
cyber crimes victims. A relevant study report, ‘Norton Cybercrime Report – The Human Impact’
Cyber crime is a common problem in other parts of the world. In China, Alibaba had signed an
agreement with Intertek, a London-based Internet security to improve online security. In Singapore,
the government is working to improve online security through Second Factor Authentication. It is
an extra authentication step done through a token or a one-time password sent to the user’s phone
to authenticate a transaction. Investing on online security doesn’t come cheap. However, it is a
needed expense to support the e-commerce industry as more people are buying online. Otherwise,
the consequences could be far worst: China has lost $3 billion to phishing sites.

Phishing websites stole $3 billion in China

by Willis Wee on January 17, 2011 in Asia

In 2010, the number of new viruses introduced in China

was down by 56 percent to 7.5 million, but new phishing websites increased by 10 times and
skyrocketed to 1.75 million.

According to a report is

sued by Beijing Rising International Software Co., there were more than 44 million phishing
cheating cases in 2010, which amounted to a total loss of more than $20 billion yuan ($3 billion
USD).

Phishing is a process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords

and credit card details by disguising as a trustworthy website.

Online gamers and online banking clients were the main victims. Apart from that, the rise of e-
commerce in China is also a key reason to explain the high number of phishing frauds. In China, e-
commerce improved by 22 percent last year, totaling a whopping $4.5 trillion yuan. E-commerce
also grew in terms of number of users as it was reported that China’s largest online retailer,
Taobao.com, doubled its users from 176 million in 2009 to 370 million last year.

“… Security services and users’ security awareness have not grown to keep pace with the
development of e-commerce, leaving it vulnerable to computer viruses and phishing activities that
undermine the development of e-commerce in China,” said Su Huiyan, an e-commerce analyst with
iResearch, an IT consultancy.

“Once they are tricked, some customers will lose their trust in e-commerce and stop shopping
online forever,” Su said.

“It is essential for China’s e-commerce development that the government and online retailers make
moves to provide more reliable security services and create a safe online shopping environment.”

To tackle the problem, Alibaba.com Ltd, owner of Taobao.com, signed an agreement with Intertek,
a London-based Internet security to improve online security