Preetika, a 15-year-old student from Hyderabad, India, had a negative experience while playing her favorite mobile game, Free Fire, resulting in her giving up on the game.
Last October, Preetika was playing Free Fire on her smartphone after school when she received a text message asking her to share bank information to purchase more “diamonds” on the app.
This kind of currency in popular mobile games usually allows the purchase of new weapons, skins, and more visually appealing items.
While clicking on the link and sharing her mother’s bank account details, Preetika was unaware of the dangers, and only once the account was charged 10,000 rupees ($120) did she realize it was a scam.
After Preetika told the story to her classmate, Rajeshwari, her classmate directed her to the authorities, who helped them retrieve the money and helped her understand what could have potentially happened.
Rajeshwari was able to assist and instruct Preetika because she’s among the thousands of students from the southern Indian state of Telangana trained to become “cyber ambassadors” in the region.
According to a July 2022 study by researchers at the Central University of Kerala, Kasargod, India, the country saw an 86% rise in cybercrimes during the Covid pandemic.
Previously infamous for deploying invasive surveillance in its capital city, Telangana is now working on raising awareness about cybersecurity by educating the youth.
The Telangana state police developed a 10-month-long curriculum teaching students how to identify and avoid possible online scams and to help them combat online harassment, attempting to deal with the issue.
The cyber ambassador program is a part of the so-called Cyber Congress initiative, and its goal is to educate the students so that they can help their friends, family, and neighbors stay safe on the internet.
Telangana government has started the second batch of the course this year with almost 10,000 students after the last year’s first class of cyber ambassadors saw 3,000 students graduate.
Telangana has over 40,000 public schools with over 5 million students enrolled and is most likely the first Indian state to come up with a novel concept like this.
With the pandemic providing more digital access to people and the rise in cybercrime cases, the government deemed that the students in public schools are the most vulnerable targets and decided to help them, says Sailaja Vadlamudi, one of the two teachers of the program.
She says the children can grasp the content quickly because the program uses simple, understandable language with real-life analogies. For example, she instructs her students to treat their passwords like a toothbrush — share them with nobody else, and change them often.
Students participating in the program also complete a series of tasks aimed at helping them understand how to handle attempted scams, like fake job postings or phishing links, where the teachers ask them to double-check the email addresses and look for misspellings.
A security technologist and author, Bruce Schneier, explains that controlling cyber crimes is difficult because they often target the most vulnerable and ignorant people.
Rather than minimizing the risks of cyber scams, people usually count on third parties, such as banks and other financial institutions, to intervene and stop scams that are in progress.
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