How to Protect Yourself from Electronic Forgery

Forgery is a lucrative crime and like all crimes it has its risks. The Internet has drastically increased the risks of forgery. This is the reason we see a rise of forgery related frauds and cheatings everyday.

The pervasiveness of Internet has ensured that it is tightly linked to our finances and our financial information. However, we have been unable to properly educate ourselves with regards to taking steps to keep our financial data safe and be vigilant when online. It is these vulnerabilities that are exploited by those who know their way around the system. Most of these are tech enthusiasts who want to earn some quick bucks and then there are habitual criminals who have now taken the less risky road of electronic forgery.

What is Forgery?

Forgery is the act of copying or counterfeiting documents or objects mainly to derive benefit at the expense of someone else. In India, it is a crime under Section 464 of the Indian Penal Code. According to this Section, forgery is committed by counterfeiting a document or object and use that counterfeited everything for a wrongful purpose. Forgery can be classified as follows:

1. Financial forgery
2. Electronic forgery
3. Administrative forgery
4. Electronic forgery

For this post, we will keep ourselves limited to electronic forgery.

Electronic forgery was made punishable by the Information Technology Act, 2000 through which an amendment was made to the Indian Penal Code Section 466 to include the words “Whoever forges a document or an electronic record” in place of “Whoever forges a document.”

What Happens In Electronic Forgery?

The person committing forgery makes use of digital or electronic information stored on an electronic device or the internet to falsify your identity or create a counterfeit of any other document.

It is easy to falsify identity online because of the remoteness of the interaction. There is no face to face communication and hence it becomes easy for any person to forge your identity or take undue benefit of it. It is quite a common practise. How you steal their identity is by — illegally reproducing endorsements like digital signatures, etc.

How Do You Protect Yourself from It?

The limitations of protecting ourselves from electronic forgery is that nothing online is completely hack proof. Information Security is only as strong as its weakest link. However, this should not mean that nothing should be done to protect oneself. Everyone that uses the internet, should follow some basic best practices which are as follows:

1. Avoid disclosing any personal information to strangers over mail or chat apps.
2. Don’t forget to update your antivirus protection. It’ll protect your system from malicious virus and malware;
3. Check whether the website which you are submitting your credit or debit card information is well established or not and is verified by Verisign or similar certification or not.
4. Avoid mistyping website names like, Facbook for facebook or yaahhoo for yahoo. You can become a victim of phishing.
5. Update the passwords to your accounts regularly;
6. It’s suggested to download cloud protection software and internet safeguarding tools that will safeguard your browsing and block unwanted online pop-ups or ads that may transmit virus to your computer or your personal details to another person;

However, anyone can have a bad day and may forget to keep the best practices and suffer as a consequence. But one must not feel helpless, rather that person who suspects a forgery should immediately contact the police. The police of most states now have an IT cell or a cyber crime cell to deal specifically with these issues.

So follow the best practices and hope you that you never become a victim.