kolkata if you are a keen enthusiast of online gaming beware of the cyber criminals who may make you one of their targets the cyber cell of the southeast division has issued warning on the dangers of online video games after they came to know that people are being duped in the name of playing online even a simple game like ludo cops have asked the online gamers to use pseudo names protect personal information and not to agree to suspicious transactions it seems that the accused are generating otps which they are asking people to share for joining with the online gamers the accused are also using popular platforms and duping the addicts with promises of gaming points coins or virtual currency said an officerwe had received a complaint recently where the accused claimed that he had received an otp for a monetary transaction but ended up losing more than rs 2 lakh we realized that a specific gaming app was used to carry out the fraud as the victim had approached us after losing the money we used our network to block the money transfer and returned the money to the victims account on tuesday said dc sed sudip sarkar a police officer said that as the number of gamers and the time spent on online games have shot up drastically during the pandemic cyber criminals are striking the online gaming platforms gamers also use anonymous chatting applications communications are encrypted and servers are based in foreign countries said the officer last week cops had foiled the suicide of an 18yearold who had lost rs 10000 to online gaming fraud from vidyasagar setu hrithik lall chief technical officer of a private cyber security firm pointed to a few essential rules that should be followed while playing online it is important to set up twostep authentication for ones account access in any gaming platform for safety give strong and different passwords while entering the gaming platform for safety this ensures that no other person can trace a gamers identity in the future the device that the user is accessing must be updated with the latest os vendors or android said lall