Police: Armenia experiences growth in cyber crimes against private sector and individuals

 In 2012 the division of fight against IT crimes of the General Department of Fight against Organized Crime of the Police of Armenia, initiated the proceedings of 40 criminal cases, and 22 criminal cases have already been instituted this year, Senior Lieutenant Andrey Yashchyan, senior specialist at the specified division, said at today's press conference.

In the meantime, he said that the cyber crimes, particularly, illegal economic activity by means of computer equipment and the Internet, fell in number over the past few years.

He said that in real life there are actually no cases of blackmailing offences in Armenia, while such crimes with the use of computer technologies have become more frequent. For instance, in 2012 a user of the "Odnoklassniki" social network opened a pseudonymous account and demanded 250 thsd AMD (nearly 599 USD) from another citizen, threatening to disseminate compromising information about her. It turned out that at the moment of the crime, the criminal was serving a sentence at a penitentiary and earlier had made blackmailing offences against several persons. Yashchyan added that the logins and passwords of 50 "Odnoklassniki" users were stolen and fake pages were created.

The policeman said that when committing cyber thieveries, the criminals take over the e-correspondence of the business partners by changing the details and invoices so that the funds are transferred to the criminals' accounts. In one of such cases the damage of the victim totaled $134 thsd. The international chain of the 5- 6 cyber thieveries fixed by the Department, included not only Armenia, but also China, Japan and other countries. The victims of the cyber thieveries were also individuals - customers of foreign e-stores, who did not receive the goods they had paid for.

Yashchyan said that in order to detect the international cyber crimes, the Department has the Point of Contact of 24/7 G-8 and the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, to which 60 countries have joined. He advises using protected internet resources that use Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, inform nobody of the credit card data, using difficult passwords in order to avoid cyber crimes.