Three out of 10 still fall prey to cyber fraud

Mumbai: Despite various attempts by the Mumbai police and cyber police to alert citizens about the need to protect their passwords, nearly three out of 10 persons continue to fall prey to cyber fraud, according to cyber officials.

To thwart cheats from fraudulently acquiring passwords, Mumbai police’s Twitter handle on Monday posted a meme saying, “Keep your passwords complex for aneasy life”.

Akbar Pathan, deputy commissioner of police (cybercrime), said, “We have requested users many times not to keep birth dates as passwords, as they are extremely easy to hack.A healthy password should contain a combination of numbers and alphabets that nobody can imagine, and one should never reveal it to anyone, not even family members.”

A very old modus operandi used by several fraudsters is sending links to social media users containing viruses that direct to different pages altogether, thereby hacking data such as login id and password. To keep fraudsters at bay, the police has asked social media users to use complex passwords that are hard to crack and not to click on suspicious links and report such websites and pages to the cyber police immediately.