The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : And now, financial shenanigans with a cyber twist

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, May 12, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

And now, financial shenanigans with a cyber twist

Karthik Subramanian

The evidence is in the form of computer records The employee had not accounted for several students who had enrolled into various programmes

CHENNAI: The City Cyber Crime Cell is probing a case of financial fraud committed by a woman employee of a software-training centre, who allegedly manipulated the company records to siphon off huge sums of money.

The loss to the firm is estimated to be about Rs. 26 lakhs. This is the second case in as many weeks that the cyber cell is probing a financial fraud in software firms. In both cases, the evidence relied on is in the form of computer records.

According to a complaint filed by the accounts manager of Intelligent Software Solutions Private Limited, which ran a franchisee training centre for a leading IT training company in T. Nagar till recently, the centre's former manager had duped the company by not accounting for several students who had enrolled into various programmes.

Mismatch

The mismatch surfaced last September when the IT firm sent a letter congratulating Intelligent Software Solutions for reaching its target for the year. The franchisee unit officials were shocked when the letter pointed out that they had achieved an annual target of more than Rs.75 lakhs as recorded in its accounting software, a network run in all franchisee units, while they found a backlog of Rs. 26 lakhs in their bank account.

The company has now alleged that the former manager, in connivance with two other officials in the company, had siphoned off the money. The company also provided the police with copies of e-mails written from the former manager's email ID to the directors admitting that there are "cash collections [from students] that may not have been accounted in the books."

Though the case was initially filed under Indian Penal Code section 408 (criminal breach of trust) and investigated by crime police, it has now been transferred to the cyber crime cell to explore the possibilities of filing chargesheet under section 66 (hacking) of the Information Technology Act.

Another case

In a similar case, the cyber police had recently arrested the additional director of a city-based software firm on charges misusing company resources and hacking into the system.

Based on a complaint filed by Sukhminder Singh Boparai, the chairman and managing director of Business Application Service Providers, police arrested M. Sujith Shekar for using company resources as well as services of programmers for an unauthorised project for a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company.

Upon learning that the top company officials had found out the fraud, the accused had backed up the files on DVDs and deleted them from the company's servers. He also changed the passwords to the server and left the company. Police have seized the DVDs and the accused has been remanded to judicial custody.

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