CCB busts international cybercrime racket, arrests two

The Cyber Crime Wing of the Central Crime Branch (CCB), Bengaluru, on Monday busted an international cybercrime racket where a private firm was hacked and ₹47 crore swindled from its bank accounts.

The police have arrested two individuals who facilitated the cybercrime, but they were low-level operatives, even as the kingpins of the scam were said to be based out of Dubai.

The CCB has been able to also make a partial recovery of ₹10 crore.

“This is the first of its kind of case cracked by the CCB team. We have gathered the details of the accused in Dubai and efforts are on to track them down,” said City Police Commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh.

According to the complaint by the senior manager of Wisdom Finance Pvt. Ltd., several unauthorised and suspicious money transfers amounting to ₹47 crore were made within two and a half hours from the company’s bank accounts on the midnight of October 6.

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, the complaint said.

The police found that a total of 1,782 transactions had been made from the accounts of Wisdom Finance Pvt. Ltd., and the money was transferred into 656 different bank accounts. Among these, in a particular transaction, ₹27,39,000 had been transferred into a State Bank of India account, based on which the police tracked down the accused who was identified as Sanjay Patel, 43. The police arrested him from his hometown at Udayapur in Rajasthan.

A plumber by profession, Patel used to provide mule accounts to the accused for a commission in return.

Further investigation revealed that ₹5.5 crore had been transferred from the company’s account to the bank account of one Unknown Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Hyderabad. It later routed to a private bank account belonging to another individual.

It was also discovered that this transaction was conducted using IP addresses belonging to one Webyne Data Centre, and those IP addresses had been purchased by another person who was identified as Ismail Rasheed Attar, 27, a high school dropout, working as a digital marketing executive in Belagavi. The police arrested Attar.

The probe further revealed that two of the kingpins, residing in Dubai, had rented five servers, the IP addresses from Attar, hired Hong Kong–based hackers, who tampered with the finance company’s API systems to bypass its security software and carried out unauthorised fund transfers from Wisdom Finance Pvt. Ltd.’s accounts using Hong Kong and Lithuania–based IP addresses.