How cyber police get around the law to tackle crime

In cases where an offender is known but is outside the country, the cyber police resort to unconventional methods to reign in offenders, Mohamed Thaver reports.

In cases where an offender is known but is outside the country, the cyber police resort to unconventional methods to reign in offenders.

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An officer from the cyber police station said that last year a girl approached them after her former boyfriend from Mumbai, who was working in China, started defaming her by creating a fake email address and sending derogatory mails to her friends.

“The girl was sure it was him, but we did not have technical evidence to back the claim.”

That is when the police started thinking out-of-the-box.

“We attached spy software to an email and sent it to the ID the man had been using to defame the girl. As soon as he clicked on the mail, we started getting a record of his activities, including the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the computer he was using to send mail.” An IP address is a unique numerical address attached to a computer.

“We then checked the email he had been sending to his parents from his own email ID. Both had the same IP address,” said the officer.

Armed with proof, the police approached his parents, who were residing in the city. “We told them about their son’s activities and proved the girl’s allegations with technical evidence. The parents contacted their son, and the defamatory emails stopped,” added the officer. He said, “Normally, we would have had to send a Letter Rogatory to China. But by the time we would have done that, he may have shifted jobs or the country.”