Due to a lack of digital literacy and the changing nature of crime, the elderly have increasingly fallen victim to cyber crimes in 2024.
Ramesh turned his attention towards his screen as the familiar ding of a notification resonated through his device. His eye caught the culprit amidst the row of notifications on his glowing screen.
He had finally found a buyer for his old couch. The one he had been trying to sell off for quite some time. He got in touch with the buyer and set up a deal. Everything seemed to be smooth sailing from there.
Things started to get fishy when the buyer told him that he wasn’t going to meet him in person and he would send someone over. Ramesh raised an eyebrow but it wasn’t suspicious enough to call off the deal.
But when he was asked to scan a quick response (QR) code, his son smelled a rat and stepped in. The 57-year-old quickly blocked the user at his son’s behest. And then reported them to the classifieds company where he set up the deal.
“There has been a sharp spike in cyber crimes against elderly people in the current year, compared to the past three years,” said police inspector Hazaresh, who heads the Bengaluru cybercrime division.
This has been a consistent trend as National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) crime statistics reported an 86 per cent rise in cyber crimes against senior citizens from the year 2020 to 2022.
“Most victims tend to be recently retired individuals, whose need for new sources of income is exploited through financial fraud,” he elaborated.
Inspector Hazaresh did clarify that the elderly are not the only ones who fall victim to cyber fraud scams and that people from all age demographics all vulnerable.
This was evident when Shreya (name changed), a 36yearold woman fell victim to a similar QR code scam, wherein someone impersonated a customer service worker for an e-commerce company and stole Rs.10,000 from her.
“We made multiple trips to the police commissioner’s office for cyber cell complaints and followed up with them. But in the end, we lost the money,” her partner said.
Cybercrime is a relatively recent phenomenon but various efforts have been made to address the phenomenon—from setting up different Cyber Economic and Narcotics Crime Police Station (CEN) branches in 2017 in Bengaluru to report cybercrime to launching a helpline to aid victims of cybercrime in 2023.
Despite this, official data on cyber crimes against the elderly is difficult to come by. Police said that they did not have official data about the age of the victims.
Job frauds in Bangalore were ranked the highest, coming in at 459 cases followed by debit/credit card and online money transferfrauds at 286. Lottery fraud and SIM card cloning were at the lowest, with one case each.
Digital illiteracy and impulsive instincts of digital users were highlighted as the reasons for people falling prey to cybercrime by Deputy Inspector General of Police (DGIP) Vamsi Krishna. He addressed a workshop on tackling cybercrime in February at the Bengaluru IAS officer’s association.
He said that the generational gap and low digital literacy of senior citizens make them the most vulnerable to cybercrime.
In a 2021 survey conducted by the non-governmental organization Age Well Foundation who is affiliated with the United Nations, more than half of the elderly stated that they were in need of digital education and training. In a 2017 report, it was stated that more than 90 per cent of the elderly were digitally illiterate with 70 per cent of them being women.
To combat this issue, national NGOs such as Help Age India and Bangalore-based firms like Easy Hai conduct digital literacy classes where the elderly are taught the nuances of digital technology, such as how to navigate social media applications such as Whatsapp, how to screen for fake news, ways in which one can protect their user privacy and their user data. They also teach the ways in which they can navigate the internet and protect themselves from fraudulent actors.
Financial digital literacy also seems to be a dire need as Tsaro, a cyber security firm estimated that around $ 36 billion was lost by the elderly in India to cyber security scams in 2021.
But due to the evolving nature of digital technology, new scams keep getting invented, leaving the police, with all resources and efforts still struggling to catch up. Vamsi Krishna stated that reports of cybercrime had increased by 182 per cent in Karnataka in the past two years with an increase in new kinds of ransom ware (where users are extorted by hackers, where their digital files are frozen or personal digital information is stolen, until the user pays the hacker a ransom) and malware (malicious software that infects a victim’s device and conducts malicious activity against the user including theft, privacy invasion and blackmail).
He described them as ‘polymorphic’, wherein the software runs on Artificial Intelligence (A.I) and replicate itself and spreads in different ways every time, which makes it difficult for the police to track.
The Future Crime Research Foundation, released a report where Bengaluru was identified as an emerging hub for cyber crimes as explained in it’s report ‘A Deep Dive into Cybercrime trends impacting India’.
Apprehending cyber criminals became challenging for police officers as the accused were located in north Indian states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Delhi, Rajasthan and Jharkhand.
Similarly, for digital courier scams, where a scammer impersonates a delivery person for an e-commerce website in order to gather personal information from the victim and defraud them of their money, the accused were reported to be in the states of Kerala, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi.
The police staff also reported having a dearth of resources to tackle these emerging crimes with 30 to 40 people in a cyber crime department having to tackle a thousand cases per day on top of having to track and apprehend the accused in places outside of their jurisdiction.
