Cybercrime, Yahoo Yahoo, computer fraud, these are some of the terms commonly used to refer to internet fraudsters, those persons who are capable of committing heinous crimes against undeserving person around the globe with the aim of extorting money from their targets, stealing identities and even going as far as to steal the intellectual property of unsuspecting citizens.
Over the years, Nigeria has witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of internet fraudsters within her shores all the more reason why we should ever vigilant and watchful in order to successfully apprehend cybercriminals without mistaken them for the innocent who just happens to fit the profile.
While the above is true and factual, it appears as though the special section of the police force charged with the responsibility of taking care of these fraudsters are going a tad bit overboard with their responsibilities, the reason being that Cybercrime is a criminal activity that either targets or uses a computer, a computer network or a networked device. Most, but not all, cybercrimes are committed by cybercriminals or hackers who want to make money and evidence of this can hardly be found by merely looking at the devices of the ‘suspected’ cybercriminal.
What we as Nigerians witness, on the other hand, is SARS men stopping suspects and searching phones, looking through messages and emails with the aim of seeing some specific keywords they can use to convict the suspects, many of such keywords are used mainstream in a lot of industries but these operatives do not care. There have been cases of persons arrested because of the word client on their phones and even more preposterous is arresting someone because he has multiple email accounts on his phone.
This is not the way to go, many other states overseas plagued with incessant cyber-attacks have more organized systems to go about this, and none of them involves standing by the roadside checking the mobile phones of persons. Thinking about it is just laughable.
This is what the SARS has been doing over the years, extorting money from people under the guise of investigating cybercrimes and the worse part of it all is that the rate of cyber criminals caught by these methods is nothing to write home about. And the worse part of it all is that 90% of these men know next to nothing about tackling cybercrime in the truest sense of the word, most of them are not techy enough to understand most of the basics of initiating a cyber-attack, a fraudulent mail, malware or viruses.
The ignorance of this men seems to be the most dangerous trait they possess, next to their violent and trigger happy tendencies. We have seen them for who they are, what they are capable of and we now know that they are more dangerous than the actual scammers and thieves they are to protect us from, so why then does the government continue to indulge them while they harass and brutalize harmless people?
It is about time we #EndSars because they truly have done more harm than good.