Cred­it card fraud, iden­ti­ty theft, cy­ber-stalk­ing, child pornog­ra­phy and mon­ey laun­der­ing are just some of the cy­ber crimes be­ing com­mit­ted in T&T. That was the col­lec­tive voice which res­onat­ed through the au­di­to­ri­um of Praise City In­ter­na­tion­al as pub­lic in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer of the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice, Sgt Wayne Mys­tar host­ed a sem­i­nar re­cent­ly on cy­ber crime. It was ti­tled The Op­por­tu­ni­ties We Give To Crim­i­nals. Mys­tar, who is al­so a rev­erend with Flam­ing Word Min­istry, or­gan­ised the pro­gramme as part of his M-Pow­er­ment ini­tia­tive which he con­ducts on a month­ly ba­sis at the min­istry. Oth­er crimes iden­ti­fied at the sem­i­nar in­clud­ed at­tacks on com­put­ers through the spread of virus­es, Tro­jan hors­es, etc, and the use of tech­no­log­i­cal de­vices to store il­le­gal or stolen in­for­ma­tion. The fea­ture speak­er at the event was a po­lice of­fi­cer who asked not to be iden­ti­fied. He is an ex­pert on cy­ber crime de­tec­tion. In his ad­dress to par­tic­i­pants, he ex­plained the el­e­ments of cy­ber crime and how it was gain­ing mo­men­tum in T&T and the world. The ex­pert said cy­ber space had pro­vid­ed an ex­pan­sion of crim­i­nal pop­u­la­tion to chil­dren.

He said some chil­dren had be­come the mas­ter­minds be­hind many of the cy­ber crimes. He not­ed, too, that cell­phones, ipads, an­droids, etc, were wide­ly used by chil­dren, which made avail­able in­for­ma­tion that could cor­rupt their val­ue sys­tems, from hack­ers to crack­ers to jack­ers. Founder, pres­i­dent and chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of Praise City In­ter­na­tion­al, Bish­op Dave Al­leyne, ap­proved the project as part of his crime pre­ven­tion plan. Al­leyne, who was in­ter­viewed by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice, re-em­pha­sised his min­istry's role in tack­ling the crime prob­lem with­in the na­tion. Mys­tar ex­plained that the sem­i­nar was host­ed to forge a proac­tive ap­proach be­tween the po­lice and com­mu­ni­ties with the em­pha­sis on ed­u­cat­ing the pub­lic of not be­com­ing vic­tims of dif­fer­ent lev­els of crime.

"We may not be able to con­trol the mo­tives or abil­i­ties of crim­i­nals, but we can con­trol the op­por­tu­ni­ties we give them. So the ses­sion was de­signed to re­duce the op­por­tu­ni­ties," Mys­tar said.Mys­tar said the Po­lice Ser­vice was will­ing to part­ner with non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions and non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tions and any group to con­duct ed­u­ca­tion­al sem­i­nars on crime pre­ven­tion.