Sourav Hazra (25) was arrested by the Kolkata Police on June 26 for creating a fake profile of a married woman on the social networking site Orkut and for allegedly sending her obscene text messages.

The woman was a former classmate of the accused and the police suspect that he had a grudge against her.

Sourav is not the only one who has used the internet to either defame someone or swindle money. Recently, two Nigerians were caught running a bogus online lottery and duping a man from New Delhi of Rs 5,50,000. Both these cases were examples of rampant cyber crimes which are making the headlines these days.

The terms computer crime and cybercrime are restricted to describing criminal activity in which the computer or network is a necessary part of the crime. These terms were sometimes used to include traditional crimes such as fraud, theft, blackmail, forgery, and embezzlement in which computers or networks are used.

“As the use of computers has grown, computer crime has become more frequent. In fact Sections 66, 67 and 68 of the Information Technology Act, along with the IPC, are invoked to book people for committing these crimes,” says Javed Shamim, Deputy Commissioner, Detective Department.

A cyber crime cell was introduced in the detective department of the Kolkata Police in mid-2005.

Cyber crimes can broadly be classified into obscenity and abusive cases and those pertaining to financial forgery, the most common case being the use of abusive languages and obscene pictures.

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