Cybercrime cops bag top prize in Visakhapatnam

Visakhapatnam: It looks straight out of a movie scene when Inspector of Police, Cybercrime police station V Gopinath narrated how he and his team zeroed in on a spoofing case and arrested four youngsters all aged between 22 and 27 years. The team's 45-day-long painstaking efforts yielded results.

Thanks to their sleepless nights and never-say-die attitude, the team not only received accolades from various quarters for cracking the case but also stood first in the Award for Best Crime Detection (ABCD) presented to them by Director General of Police D Gautam Sawang at AP Police Headquarters. The award comprises a cash prize of Rs.1 lakh and a certificate.

Recalling their triumph, Gopinath says that they could not think of anything else except focusing on finding the gang for over a month. "It was a tough case because the perpetrators made calls through Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) which made our job even more challenging.

From tracing 75,000 mobile identification numbers to 8,719 tower IDs and 512 IP addresses, it was a time-consuming exercise for us to come down to four destination IPs through which we could inch closer to the scene of crime," elaborates Gopinath. He says that unmasking the data shared by WhatsApp authorities took quite a while and analysing tower dump turned out to be a futile exercise in the process.

The gang, headed by P Vishnu Murthy, a B Tech dropout, involved in making spoof calls to former MLAs, MPs and ministers and collecting amount, coordinating with the team include G Tarun Kumar, P Jaya Krishna and M Jagadish.

The list of spoof calls made included PA to former chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, PA to Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy. Interestingly, the crime occurred during the TDP regime but was cracked during the successor government.

Under the leadership of the former Commissioner of Police, Visakhapatnam Mahesh Chandra Laddha, the crime was busted with the support of Gopinath, SI N Ravi Kumar, police constables Satish Kumar and Murali and home guard Rambabu of the cyber crime police station.

While the police of Central Crime Station, Vizianagaram grabbed the second prize in ABCD, the Railway Kodur police of Kadapa district stood third.

The team not only received accolades from various quarters for cracking the case but also stood first in the Award for Best Crime Detection (ABCD) presented to them by Director General of Police D Gautam Sawang at AP Police Headquarters

 -Rani Devella