Covid – one more suffering

There’s a video clip doing rounds in social media in which a group of burglars is lamenting at the grave loss to their business as a consequence of the current Covid pandemic. They are shown complaining as everyone is talking about all businesses coming to a screeching halt but nobody is sympathising with them. As everyone is locked inside his or her home in the prevailing lockdown, where’s the opportunity for burglars to find an uninhabited home to break into for burglary?

While the video is made to humour the audiences, the fact is that an epic of this magnitude cannot be not making a deep social impact! We have many a times attributed the increased instances of crimes such as chain snatching, Eve teasing. Kidnapping etc to joblessness as youth without jobs are sometimes compelled to take unlawful activities when driven by the extreme circumstances. Of course, there’s no justifying such acts – no circumstance licenses a person to become a law unto himself, but society cannot be totally isolated from the evils of a sinking economy and it does cause misery, whatever it’s form may be.

This lockdown, of course, has forced people to stay indoors and increasingly indulge in e commerce. People have been ordering goods on line and making payments electronically, using mobile or internet banking or debit or credit card. This is leading to unprecedented increase in cyber crimes where a fraudster under the pretext of helping a person extracts personal details such as account or card details, PIN, OTP etc and then siphons off large sums of monies from the card or the account of innocent person. In fact, these are such cyber experts that they are able to take full control of the user’s device and then clean off balances in the account or card. Banks and the regulator are trying to educate public at large to be aware of these cyber fraudsters, but they sound so helpful, genuine, empathic and friendly that one ends up sharing all the details with these dangerous operators. And such cyber frauds are not restricted to financial loss; these operators are always on look out to find out ways and means to compromise your and mine personal details and misuse them in creating fake documents to be used for unlawful and unauthorised usage. In fact, physical crimes hurt us then and there; cyber crimes can hurt us deep and wide with long term consequences.

Let’s protect our hard earned money and hard earned reputation by ensuring not to fall into any kind of lure of short gains, unbelievable offers, money back, 48% return, crypto currency, befriending a glam doll or a rich guy, offer to work in foreign etc . Nothing good in this world comes easy and we should not fall for such easy offerings. And as nothing comes easy, it should not be allowed to go out easily!

Burglars are lamenting

For in lockdown there are no places to break into to commit theft

But where’s the respite for a commoner

Cyber fraudsters are weaning our money away making us bereft!

So to end this piece with my favourite catch line

Corona Corona go away

You have already come a long way

I first lost my freedom then health

And now you eating into my wealth!