Bangalore police, IT firms grapple with hoax calls

Bangalore police, IT firms grapple with hoax calls
Financial Express/Press Trust of India

BANGALORE, MARCH 18 : A spate of hoax calls in the last nine days has become a headache for Bangalore police and a source of concern for software firms, the garden city-turned Silicon Valley’s proud landmarks.

And there seems no end to it. Today, it was the turn of two Kendriya Vidyalayas in the city — at Sanjaynagar and Jeevanbheemanagar — which were the target of anonymous callers. As in previous cases, they turned out to be hoax calls.

The calls came close on the heels of Delhi Police uncovering a plot by Laskar-e-toiba militants to target software firms in the city.

It all began with a hoax call to the city office of New York Stock Exchange-listed Wipro on March 9. However, within hours after making the call, a 30-year-old Wipro employee, Prashant Kumar, was caught in the net.

And the reason he gave for the prank is that he wanted to highlight the lax security in software firms and check the alertness of police during testing times.

But engineers and other staffers rushing out of their workplace is not a pleasant sight for Bangalore which prides itself in being a global software hub.