Fishy Business

The Nidhi Razdan incident has given room for introspection by privacy law makers and data security specialists, besides providing an opportunity for the public to learn from it

- Na Vijayashankar

THE incident of well-known TV anchor Nidhi Razdan having been conned with an offer at Harvard University has created a flutter among senior executives who routinely receive such offers. The possibility of them being similarly trapped and embarrassed and losing money and their current jobs is staring in their face. The fraudster in such cases adopts a sophisticated profile research of the victim and through spear phishing, grooms them to believe that the offer is true. He further extracts money in various forms such as rendering verification service or facilitating the appointment.

The victim has filed a complaint with the police, but it is an uphill task for law enforcement to trace the fraudster. Most cyber crimes, including phishing frauds, go unsolved because the police fail to recognise the contribution of intermediaries in the commission of the crime. They don’t bring them into the investigating loop, but hold them as suspects until they prove their innocence. For a successful investigation, intermediaries such as e-mail providers as well as Harvard University need to co-operate.

One typical case in India which highlighted the responsibility and liabilities of the intermediaries and the organisation in which the phishing was encashed was S Umashankar vs ICICI Bank in which both the adjudicator of Tamil Nadu (in 2010) and TDSAT (in 2019) held that the Bank was responsible for compensating the victim for the phishing fraud. In this case, the Bank was placed in the trial as an accused and hence, judicial authorities recognised the security failure as a contravention of Section 43(g) of the Infor ma tion Technology Act, 2000.