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Cyber Fraud
Indian journalists Anand RK and Suparna Sharma have won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for their work highlighting digital surveillance and cyber fraud. Anand and Sharma won the award, announced on Monday, in the Illustrated Reporting and Commentary category. They share the award with Natalie Obiko Pearson of Bloomberg. According to The Pulitzer Prizes website, the award-winning work titled "trAPPed", produced for Bloomberg, narrates the "riveting account" of a neurologist in India who was held under a "digital arrest" through her phone, using a blend of "visuals and words" to underscore the "growing global challenges of surveillance and digital scams". The Pulitzer Prizes, administered by Columbia University, are regarded as among the highest honours in journalism, literature and music composition, recognising excellence in reporting and storytelling.
Three officials of leading private banks were arrested for their alleged involvement in a Rs 2,500-crore cyber fraud racket in Gujarat's Rajkot district, bringing the number of those held so far in the case to 20, police said on Monday. Those arrested were identified as Maulik Kamani, a personal manager at Yes Bank in Padadhari; Kalpesh Dangariya, a manager at Axis Bank in Jamnagar; and Anurag Baldha, a personal banker with HDFC Bank, Rajkot (Rural) Superintendent of Police Vijay Gurjar said. Dangariya and Baldha were previously employed with Yes Bank, he added. Kamani allegedly assisted the earlier arrested accused in opening and managing suspicious accounts. He also helped bypass banking alerts triggered by high-value transactions by submitting additional documentation to keep accounts active, the SP said. Kamani was allegedly involved in cash withdrawals that were later routed through hawala channels (illegal money transfer system), supported by digital evidence recovered from h
The Jammu and Kashmir Police's Counter Intelligence Wing (CIK) has busted a highly sophisticated international cyber fraud racket by arresting seven persons here, officials said on Thursday. The CIK-CID received several technical and credible inputs regarding the operation of "covert call centres" involved in fraudulent online activities targeting both foreign and local nationals. "The CIK promptly constituted specialised teams comprising technical experts and field operatives and carried out systematic surveillance, digital intelligence gathering and verification across multiple locations, ultimately identifying a key operational hub at the Industrial Area, Rangreth, Srinagar," they said. Subsequently, a CIK team conducted a swift and well-coordinated raid in different parts of Srinagar city on Wednesday. During the raid, seven suspects were apprehended on the spot, and a large quantity of digital and communication equipment was seized. The seized devices include 13 mobile phones,
The Supreme Court on Monday said it would hear next week a suo motu case concerning victims of digital arrest. Digital arrest is a growing form of cybercrime in which fraudsters pose as law enforcement officers, court officials or personnel from government agencies to intimidate victims through audio and video calls. They hold the victims hostage and put pressure on them to pay money. On February 9, the top court described the siphoning of more than Rs 54,000 crore by digital frauds as absolute "robbery or dacoity" and asked the Centre to draft a standard operating procedure (SoP) in consultation with stakeholders like the RBI, banks and the Department of Telecommunications to deal with such cases. On Monday, Attorney General R Venkataramani mentioned the matter before a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi. The top law officer said he would place a status report in the matter during the day. Contending that things are moving, he urged the bench to take up
Online fraudsters are using new technology that bypasses security features of UPI apps to carry out financial transactions, cyber intelligence firm CloudSEK claimed in a report. According to the report, the firm has identified at least 20 active groups on messaging platform Telegram, each with over 100 members, where a toolkit by the name of "Digital Lutera" is being discussed, distributed, and operationalised. "This is not just another UPI malware variant. Digital Lutera represents a structural attack on device trust. When the operating system itself is manipulated, traditional safeguards like SIM-binding and app signature checks become unreliable. If left unaddressed, this could industrialize account takeovers at scale across the digital payments ecosystem," CloudSEK, Threat Researcher, Shobhit Mishra said. CloudSEK claims to have done an analysis of one such group alone which indicates that transactions worth Rs 25 -30 lakh were processed over just two days, highlighting how ...