New Delhi: The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), a branch of the Ministry of Home Affairs, found and blacklisted over 1,700 Skype IDs and 59,000 WhatsApp accounts used for digital fraud, the Lok Sabha was told on Tuesday.
Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar also stated that the ‘Citizen Financial Cyber Fraud Reporting and Management System,' launched under I4C in 2021, enables immediate reporting of financial frauds to prevent the siphoning off of funds by fraudsters and so far, over Rs 3,431 crore has been saved in more than 9.94 lakh complaints.
"The I4C has pro-actively identified and blocked more than 1,700 Skype IDs and 59,000 WhatsApp accounts used for digital fraud,” Kumar said in response to a written question, PTI reported.
As of November 15, 2024, more than 6.69 lakh SIM cards and 1.32 lakh IMEIs, as reported by police authorities, have been blocked by the government.
The minister further explained that to strengthen the mechanism for addressing cyber crimes, including digital fraud, the central government and Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) have developed a system to identify and block incoming international spoofed calls that display Indian mobile numbers, making them appear as though they originate within India.
Kumar noted that such spoofed calls have been used by cybercriminals in recent cases of fake digital arrests, FedEx scams, and impersonation of government or police officials.
Directions have been issued to TSPs to block such incoming international spoofed calls. Additionally, a State-of-the-Art Cyber Fraud Mitigation Centre (CFMC) has been established at I4C, where representatives from major banks, financial institutions, payment aggregators, TSPs, IT intermediaries, and law enforcement agencies from States and UTs collaborate to ensure immediate action and seamless cooperation in tackling cybercrime.
The minister said a suspect registry of identifiers of cyber criminals was launched by I4C on September 10, 2024, in collaboration with banks and financial institutions and has introduced a new feature ‘Report and Check Suspect' on the portal cybercrime.gov.in.
This facility provides citizens with a search option to search I4C's repository of identifiers of cyber criminals through ‘suspect search'.