Jharkhand: Jamtara’s cyber mafia eyes southern states

RANCHI,OCT. 16: A sleepy little town from Jharkhand’s Jamtara has emerged on the radar of cyber investigators from as far as Chennai and several other southern Indian towns. What has perplexed the police is the language proficiency of the suspects.

According to the inputs received by the Jharkhand Police, cybercriminals are travelling down south and other regions of the country.“They learn local languages while earning through odd jobs. They return and take to cyber crimes by start trapping people of those states by speaking in their language” said a police source.

Investigators are astounded by the number of cyber crimes being traced to Jamtara.

“Investigators from almost all states arrive in Jamtara to get to the bottom of various digital frauds and deceptive calls. The suspects are extraordinarily trained, and lure their potential victims into revealing their bank account details and later blackmailing them” said a senior police officer.

A few suspects revealed to the investigators that they had gone to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala to learn languages being spoken in those states so that they could trap their targets. In one such case, the

Chennai police contacted their Jamtara counterpart in a case in which a doctor was defrauded of Rs 8 lakh.

“The Jamtara police arrested three brothers — Shamshad, Iqbal and Shahbaz — who were involved in the crime. During interrogation, the three cyber criminals admitted that they had gone to southern states in search of livelihood and learnt Tamil during their stay,” said a local police officer.

After they returned, their local handlers advised them to use the Tamil language for phishing, which actually worked well, he added. Later, they decided to send different teams in a group of five to non-Hindi speaking states to learn their local languages, said the Jharkhand police officer.

It was found that the first such case was registered at Karmatand police station in 2017, in which six people were arrested. They had fraudulently withdrawn money from several persons in Tamil Nadu by using the local dialect. Similarly, another case was registered in 2021 at the same police station in which three people were arrested. They spoke the Kannada language and defrauded over a dozen people in Karnataka by speaking Kannada.

“We are studying the pattern closely to deal with the crime more efficiently. The trend is definitely a challenge for the police department,” said IG (Ops) and Jharkhand Police spokesperson AV Homkar.

As per state police records, cybercriminals are focusing more on high-profile targets in southern states.

-TINE