Pramesh S Jain
For the first of its kind,the cyber wing of the central crime branch officials on Monday busted an international cyber crime racket and arrested two persons for hacking Bank Accounts of a private bank and Fraudulently Transferring Rs.48 Crore Using Foreign IP Addresses.
Based on the complaint,filed by the Senior Manager of Wisdom Finance Pvt.Ltd.stating that several unauthorized and suspicious money transfers amounting to Rs.47 crore within 2.5 hours from the company’s bank accounts on the midnight of October 6 , the police initiated investigation.
The company’s internal investigation revealed that these transactions had not been carried out from its official systems or registered IP addresses.
Instead,they originated from Foreign IP addresses, and approximately Rs.47 crore (47,00,00,000) had been illegally transferred from the company’s accounts to other bank accounts.
Upon further investigation,police found that a total of 1,782 transactions had been made from Wisdom Finance Pvt. Ltd.’s accounts,transferring money into 656 different bank accounts.
Among these,Rs.27,39,000 had been transferred directly into the SBI bank account based on which the police track down the accused identified as Sanjay Patel,43 and arrested him from his hometown in Udaipur in Rajasthan.
Sanjay Patel,a plumber by profession used to provide mule accounts to the accused and get commission in returns.
Further investigation revealed that Rs.5.5 crore had been transferred from the company’s account to the bank account of “unknown Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Hyderabad”,and later routed to an ICICI Bank account belonging to another individual. It was also discovered that “unknown Technologies Pvt. Ltd.”had conducted these transactions using IP addresses belonging to “Webyne Data Centre”,and those IP addresses had been purchased by another person.
Continue investigation the CCB team arrested Ismail Rasheed Attar,27,a high school drop out working as digital marketing executive from Belagavi .
Further probe revealed that two of the kingpin residing in Dubai had rented five servers,the IP addresses from Attar hired Hong Kong–based hackers,who tampered with the bank’s API systems to bypass its security software,and carried out unauthorized fund transfers from Wisdom Finance Pvt. Ltd.’s accounts using Hong Kong and Lituvania–based IP addresses.
This is first of its kind of case cracked by the CCB team with partial recovery of Rs.10 crore,City Police Commissioner,Seemant Kumar Singh,said .
The police have gathered the details of the accused in Dubai and efforts are on to track them down, he said .
