Pramesh S Jain & Yogesh K Porwar
T
he Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the CID probing the bitcoin case,led by ADGP,Manish Kharbikar,on Saturday,conducted a series of raids on the houses of Central Crime Branch (CCB) officials and two people who allegedly fabricated the seized documents and accessed the e-wallets of the prime accused Sriki for personal gain.
A team of officials raided nine places belonging to four police officials and two people,including DySP,Sridhar Pujar,Inspectors,Prashanth Babu,Chandradhar and Lakshmikanth,in different locations and recovered four laptops,eight mobile phones,two NAS (network attached storage) devices,10 hard drives,five pen drives,a memory card and other relevant documents.
The special Investigation team of CID probing e procurement hacking,arrested two more persons involved in laundering the proceeds of the money stolen after hacinhinto the state government e-portal in 2019.
With the arrest of the accused Nitiin Meshram and Darshith Patel the total number reached 21,said a senior police officer.
The team based on their information conducting search operations in several places in koramangala and Bommanahalli where the accused had worked .
Two days ago ago,the SIT team had arrested a farmer Harwinder Singh of Kapurthala in Punjab for similar chrarges of money laundering from the proceeds of the e-procurement portal of the Karnataka government.
The case pertaining to December 2019,an official of the state government’s e-procurement cell lodged a complaint with the Cyber Crime Police Station of the CID,stating that unknown persons had hacked the portal and initiated unauthorised fund transfers causing a loss of several crores of rupees.
Based on the complaint,the police arrested notorious hacker Sri Krishna alias Shriki,who was earlier arrested in an NDPS case.
Shriki is also the main accused in the Bitcoin case. “While Shriki had hacked the portal and transferred the funds, other accused had helped him to transfer the funds to various bank accounts charging a commission and laundering the proceeds of the crime.
