Evolution of cybercrime (part 4): Faces behind the crimes
After the legal procedure ends, they should be offered rehabilitation. But it has to be a concerted effort of different private institutions and volunteer organisations.
Twenty-two-year-old Ratul Sheikh is a farm labourer.
On March 10, police's Detective Branch (DB) arrested Ratul from Faridpur's Dumain village for money embezzlement by hacking a mobile financial service (MFS) account.
This correspondent talked to Ratul while he was being produced before the court.
He revealed that he did not even complete primary education.
"After working in the land, I would sit in a shop. That's where I learned hacking techniques from," said Ratul.
DB made two more arrests from the same village for the same offence. Arrestee Motaleb Sheikh (24) is a farmer by profession, while another arrestee Nasir Biswas alias Tota (26) works at a drug store.
Interestingly, none of them studied up to the SSC level.
On October 2 last year, DB's Cyber and Special Crime Division arrested Obaidur Rahman Nobel (20), Shamim Sarder (21) and Sajib Khalifa (21) for extorting money by hacking Facebook accounts with "phishing links".
The arrestees hacked over 2,000 Facebook accounts over two years, said detectives.
Nobel has been found to have studied up to SSC, Shamim up to the fourth grade and Sajib up to the third grade.
They learned hacking techniques from various online platforms.
This pattern of non-professionals being involved in cybercrimes is not an isolated one, according to investigators.
Junaed Alam Sharker, additional deputy commissioner of DB's cyber and special crime division, said around 80 percent of the criminals -- arrested on charges of hacking Imo, Facebook and MFS accounts -- are from non-technical backgrounds.
Around 90 percent of them are below the age of 28.
According to the DB official, the reason behind their involvement in such crimes is the easy availability of devices.
Most people in the country lack digital literacy and this is something such criminals cash in on, added Junaed.
MEDIUM OF EDU FOR LAW ENFORCERS
When it comes to ATM extortion, the criminals -- with no background in technical or engineering fields and minimum education -- gained experience in booth maintenance while working as cash attendants.
They looted around Tk 2.42 crore from around 231 ATM booths of several private banks from October last year to February this year.
The bank authorities noticed that money have been going missing regularly, after about six months of the initiation. Such is the expertise of the group.
PBI arrested 11 members of the syndicate behind the ATM scam following a case filed on March 6. Md Idris Ali, PBI sub-inspector and investigation officer of the case, described the methods of the crime.
Syndicate members would first load the money in bundles on the ATM, after which the machine issues a deposit report automatically. The trick was in folding some notes in a bundle of Tk 20,000.
The time window between the cash load and locking the machine is three minutes, which is utilised by the criminals. It's in these three minutes that they punch multiple debit cards carrying around Tk 21,000 each, while the machine is still open.
The machine faces trouble while cashing out the money when it comes to counting the folded notes. The transaction fails but the cash goes to its reserve box, from which they collect the cash from the open machine. With five such failed transactions, they would collect up to Tk 1,00,000 in bundles of Tk 20,000.
Later, they would lock the machine and the ATM card, from where money was debited earlier, automatically get a credit, without altering the deposit report. This loophole made it almost impossible for bank officials to trace the loss of cash from the machines.
During a recent workshop arranged for Police Bureau of Investigation (PBI) officials, a presentation included such extortion techniques. Law enforcers gathered the information from arrestees on cybercrime charges.
IS REHABILITATION VIABLE?
PBI chief AIG Banaj Kumar Majumder said arrested cybercriminals are young and have commendable technical expertise.
"After the legal procedure ends, they should be offered rehabilitation. But it has to be a concerted effort of different private institutions and volunteer organisations," he said.
When asked if the arrestees can be trained further after rehabilitation to assist law enforcers to help fight the crime, Prof Dr Saifuddin Md Tareq, head of the computer sciences and engineering department at Dhaka University, said as they have no formal technical education, the initiative might backfire.
"Most of them have learned from open sources. We have to take their criminal instincts into account. If they are given professional training, they might use it for more sophisticated forms of cybercrime," he said.
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