A retired judge of the Karnataka High Court has filed a police complaint after he was allegedly targeted by cyber fraudsters, who posed as officials of the Data Protection Board of India, and suggested he was involved in illegal activities.
The retired HC judge, Justice K N Phaneendra, 67, who is currently the Deputy Lokayukta in the Karnataka Lokayukta, filed the police complaint on July 9. According to his police complaint, he received calls from two people who called themselves Deepak Kumar Sharma and Rahul Kumar Sharma in the afternoon of July 9.
The caller, who identified himself as Deepak Sharma, told the judge that he was a senior legal consultant for the Data Protection Board of India, and Rahul Sharma claimed to be a junior legal consultant. The callers told Justice Phaneendra that his Aadhaar card was linked to his mobile phone number, which they said was being used in illegal activities.
The retired judge told the callers to send him an official legal notice. He later approached the Central CEN Police Station in Bengaluru, and filed a complaint.
The Bengaluru police have said that cyber criminals have been adopting various tactics to target victims for extortion by claiming to be officers of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), police, Narcotics Bureau, and officials of GST.
The cyber criminals instil fear of arrest in gullible victims by suggesting their involvement in crimes like terrorism, drug peddling and other activities. Several victims have lost their life savings in these crimes, where the accused are rarely traced and the stolen money is lost in the layers of laundering by the criminals.
In March this year, an elderly couple from a village in Karnataka’s Belagavi district allegedly died by suicide after losing approximately Rs 50 lakh to a cyber fraud that was similar to the one attempted on Justice Phaneendra.
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Data from the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal (NCRP) for 2024, as quoted in a Karnataka CID police study on mule accounts in cyber crimes, indicates that Rs 2,915 crore was lost in 6.11 lakh cyber crimes in Karnataka. The losses to cyber crimes in Karnataka are reported to have increased fourfold in 2024, from Rs 660 crore reported in 2023.
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