Karnataka   

Hacker lands in police net in Bangalore

BANGALORE: The cyber crime police arrested a man who allegedly hacked the internet banking accounts of several customers after stealing data from computers they had used at cyber cafés and siphoned off lakhs of rupees from their accounts.

Director-General of Police (Corps of Detectives) Ajai Kumar Singh on Friday said Joseph of Virudanagar in Tamil Nadu, who had a diploma in computer science, was the kingpin of the 12-member gang they had arrested.

The police had found 100 bank account numbers, passwords and other details of individual customers from Joseph’s three email accounts. HDFC Bank, Citibank, Axis Bank and ICICI Bank had confirmed the authenticity of about 70 existing accounts and passwords that were found in these accounts, Dr. Singh said in a press release. Joseph’s accomplices approached cellphone holders in Karnataka, Kerala and Mumbai and offered them currency recharge at huge discounts. They provided the cellphone numbers to Joseph who recharged them by hacking into bank accounts and transferring funds online.

While the cellphone users got currency recharged at huge discounts, the money paid by them was shared among the accused. The innocent bank customers lost money in the process, Dr. Singh said. The racket came to light after Carl Braganza, a senior manager with an IT company, lodged a complaint with the cyber crime police in October that someone had hacked into his Citibank account and defrauded him of Rs. 1.27 lakh through three transactions made towards cellphone currency recharging.

The police traced the internet protocol (IP) number of the terminal from which the transactions were made and it led them to a cyber café at Mahadevapura. The proprietor helped the police zero in on the user. Joseph was arrested and his confession included the details of his accomplices.

The police said that he operated from five cyber cafes at Mahadevapura, HAL 3rd Stage, Kalyananagar and Old Madras Road in Bangalore and Gokulam in Mysore. He timed the theft mainly during the first week of the month as several people frequented the cyber cafes to make online financial transactions and to check their salary accounts. To aid his operation, he installed the freely available Keylogger, the keystroke recording software that captures data of subsequent users of the PC. All he had to do then was to turn up again to collect account numbers, passwords and other details of the bank customers who had used the terminal, the police said. Joseph had hacked into and siphoned off Rs. 15,000 from UTI Bank account of R. Jayachandran, Rs. 87,000 from HDFC Bank account of Amarthya Kumar Ghosh, Rs. 50,000 from HDFC Bank account of B.R. Madhava Rao and Rs. 75,000 from Citibank account of Yeshwanth Krishna during August 2006 and August 2007, the police said.

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