“Cybercrime includes credit card fraud, identity theft, child pornography, indecent chat-room behavior, e-mail fraud, threat and hacking of sites,” he said.

After a person recently lost Rs 5.5 lakh to a bogus online lottery, the cell successfully tracked the internet service protocol of the sender, Sanjoy Roy, an officer of the cell, said.

“We also managed to arrest a key woman member of the gang from Delhi, but the other masterminds, all Nigerians, are absconding,” he said.

“A software engineer of an MNC was arrested after sending obscene mails to women employees of an NGO in 2006, while another executive was chargesheeted for posting morphed nude pictures of women in 2007. Both are out on bail now,” he said.

A hardware engineer was tracked for his threat mail to blow up the institute in which he studied, Roy said.

In August 2006, the department arrested a woman call centre employee on a complaint from the US that she was removing funds from credit cards.

Six months later, an online prostitution racket was busted and a person was arrested, Choudhury said.

“We are probing the complaint of a woman facing harassment on a popular social networking site and profile defacement,” Choudhury added.

Deputy Commissioner of the Detective Department Jawed Shamim said the cell has the equipment to carry digital forensic tests and track and retrieve stolen data through which deleted images and text could be retrieved from hard drives.

“Since its setting up two years ago, the cell has alread achieved a great success,” Shamim said.

Asked about the possibility of misusing Blackberry mobiles by terrorists, where emails could not be tracked by the service provider, Shamim said, “Yes we are aware of it. Since mobiles can also be used for committing cyber crimes, the cyber cell at times works in tandem with the special branch for cracking cases involving wap-enabled mobiles.”

To save the young falling prey to cyber predators, the Kolkata police has organized awareness campaign about cyber crimes in two premier city schools as children, particularly girls, are victimised unknowingly.

“We suggest them not to open up an Internet account before a stranger or give personal details, besides changing passwords regularly,” Shamim added.

IT student held for cybercrime
Bhubaneswar: Gopal Krushna Panigrahi, a second year IT student at an institute in Bhubaneswar, was arrested on Wednesday on charge of releasing objectionable photographs of a girl on Internet after she refused to marry him, the police said.

He allegedly termed her as a ‘call girl’ and mentioned some telephone numbers, both landline and mobile to contact her.

The photos of the girl, a student of computer engineering, were taken by a web-camera at a private cyber cafe in the town about six month ago.

Police said a laptop, several CDs and some other documents were seized from his room.