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City’s cash-poor computer cops in cyber crimes challenge

The Jakarta Police’s Cyber Crime Division says is doing its best to crackdown on Internet scams, including theft and kidnapping schemes, with a small team, a shoestring budget and limited infrastructure

The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Mon, October 29, 2012

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City’s cash-poor computer cops in cyber crimes challenge

T

he Jakarta Police’s Cyber Crime Division says is doing its best to crackdown on Internet scams, including theft and kidnapping schemes, with a small team, a shoestring budget and limited infrastructure.

The team, established in 2003 under the Special Crimes Directorate to recruit information technology (IT) experts within the police, handled 625 cases in 2011, and have recorded 395 cases for 2012 as of August.

For its budget, the division — currently comprising five units with nine officers in each — is allotted a specific amount for each case processed. “A team is given Rp 4 million (US$416) for ‘small’ cases, Rp 9 million for relatively bigger cases and Rp 14 million for big cases, which involves a large amount of resources. It has to request the money every time it investigates a case,” Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto told The Jakarta Post recently.

“The team maybe lacks human resources, software, hardware and much more, but it tries its best to serve the public with what it has got,” he added.

The unit works with Indonesia’s Asian neighbors, Australia, the US, and international organizations such as Interpol to track down criminals using the Internet.

“Those are examples, but we cannot reveal the details of with whom we are working. That’s classified,” one unit chief, Comr. Ahmad Marpaung, said.

The division took part in the case involving the teenager in Depok, West Java, who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped, allegedly by a man that she met on Facebook.

The 14-year-old girl was the latest in a long list of victims of a human trafficking ring operating on widely used social media outlets. The girl was reported missing for a week following a meeting with a man that she met through Facebook.

The recent arrest in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta, of illegal airsoft gun sellers on the Kaskus community forum is another example of what the division has been doing.

The team uses any possible action to find the source. “Through IP [Internet Protocol} addresses, user names, everything. We have specific procedures,” Ahmad said.

The officer said the division worked mostly based on reports from victims, without which he said the scope would be too wide. “But our cyber patrol operation monitors suspicious social media accounts and or websites on daily basis, which we crackdown on whenever possible,” he said.

In the end, however, even with limited resources to tackle online criminal cases, the police said they monitored trends. “Suppose kidnapping through Facebook is currently frequent, we would focus our search on this particular crime,” Ahmad said, adding that the rest would be based on citizens’ reports.

The division divides cyber crimes into twelve classifications. The highest number of cases is Internet and or online shopping scams: transferring money to a seller for which goods are not delivered.

From the 395 cases registered up to August 2012, the police revealed that 253 of them were online shopping fraud. (fzm)

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