ISLAMABAD: Cyber harassment increased by a massive 189 percent during the Covid-19 pandemic, says Digital Rights Foundation (DRF). According to a report of the DRF as compared to January and February, March and April saw an increase of 189 percent in complaints registered with the DRF's Cyber Harassment Helpline.
In terms of numbers, 136 complaints were received during March and April, compared to 47 in January and February 2020. When the country entered its first lockdown in response to the pandemic outbreak, the DRF surmised the possibility of an increase in cyber-harassment cases.
In a succinct breakdown of the report, the complaints were registered under the following categories, defamation four percent, hate speech one percent, fake profiles four percent, blackmailing 18 percent, unsolicited contact 17 percent, non-consensual 18 percent, threat 13 percent, and phishing seven percent.
The majority of these complaints came from Lahore and other areas of Punjab by those aged between 20-25 years. According to the Ministry of Interior, the number of complaints about online crime being lodged with the Cyber Crime Wing of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has increased by more than double during the last four years.
The comparison of last four years' official data shows that as many as 9,075 complaints of private citizens, government servants and public as well as private-sector institutions were registered with the Cyber Crime Wing in 2016.
This number grew a little, as 9,364 such complaints were registered in 2017. The year 2018 witnessed a substantial increase of more than 100 percent as 19,014 complaints were registered by the FIA the same year. The number of online crime complaints grew to 27,214 in 2019, which is another more than 50 percent increase as compared with the preceding year.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2020
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