GUJRAT: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has recently expanded its operations to tackle the rising number of cyber crime complaints as the number of the cyber crime reporting centres (CCRCs) has been increased across the country.

Initially, the CCRCs, also known the FIA Police Stations, were only five in the country but keeping in view the sharp rise in cyber crime due to the excessive use of social media and apps in Pakistan, the FIA decided to enhance its operations.

Muhammad Afzal Butt, the director FIA Cyber Crime, told Dawn 10 more CCRCs had been established and now the number of such police stations was 15. He said there were two CCRCs in Balochistan (Quetta and Gwadar), three in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad and Sukhur), five in Punjab (Lahore, Multan, Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Rawalpindi), three in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Peshawar, Abbottabad and Dera Ismail Khan) and one each in Gilgit-Baltistan and Islamabad.

These centres are being headed by officers of the deputy director level whereas three CCRCs make a zone as there are some five zones in the country. An additional director heads each zone while Gilgit-Baltistan has been attached to the Islamabad zone.

When asked about the slow pace of work on the cyber complaints by the citizens, Mr Butt said the CCRCs were facing multiple challenges as most of the newly established centres did not have any official vehicle to move around besides the technical limitations and non-cooperation by the management of social media apps also contributed to slow pace of work. Now, he added, the government had approved provision of 38 vehicles and some 50 motorbikes for the CCRCs in the budget that would hopefully be made available within next few months. He said there were some legal lacunae in dealing with the cyber crime that needed to be resolved through legislation. He said the complaints could be lodged with these CCRCs while a complaint form was also available on the web portal of the FIA for lodging a complaint.

There are no offices of Facebook, Twitter and other major social media apps in Pakistan and the FIA has to approach the management of these sites in United States to seek the data and IPA addresses of the suspects.

The FIA director said the management of Twitter had been forwarded at least 6,137 complaints by the FIA regarding the fake accounts but none of these complaints had ever been responded to as they would say that a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) was required between Pakistan and America for such a cooperation so the Twitter was not bound to respond to such complaints from Pakistan.

However, Mr Afzal Butt added, an effective protection mechanism was needed to cope with the negative use of the expanding phenomenon of social media as well as withdrawal of cash amounts from the bank accounts and ATM machines by the criminal gangs.

Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2019