Bengaluru, Oct 27 (PTI) Two people have been arrested for allegedly hacking into the bank accounts of a private finance company and fraudulently transferring Rs 48 crore using foreign IP addresses, police
said on Monday.
A probe began after a senior manager of Whizdm Finance Pvt Ltd lodged a complaint at the cybercrime police station here on August 7, police said.
In his complaint, he stated that between August 6 and 7, several unauthorised and suspicious money transfers had taken place from the company's bank accounts.
"The company's internal investigation revealed that these transactions were not carried out from its official systems or registered IP addresses. Instead, they originated from foreign IP addresses, and approximately Rs 47 crore had been illegally transferred from the company's accounts to other bank accounts," a senior police officer said.
Further investigation showed that a total of 1,782 transactions had been made from the company's accounts, transferring funds to 656 different bank accounts, the officer said.
Among these, Rs 27.39 lakh had been transferred to the SBI account of one individual, who was arrested on September 25 and remanded to judicial custody, police said.
"Further investigation revealed that Rs 5.5 crore had been transferred from the company's account to the bank account of a private firm based in Hyderabad, and later routed to an ICICI Bank account belonging to another individual," police said in a statement.
"It was also found that the Hyderabad-based company had carried out these transactions using IP addresses belonging to Webyne Data Centre. Those IP addresses had been purchased by another person," it added.
On October 9, another suspect was taken into custody, police said.
"It was revealed that two individuals residing in Dubai had rented five servers," the statement said.
"The investigation established that the two Dubai-based individuals had hired Hong Kong–based hackers, who tampered with the bank's API systems to bypass its security software," it added.
"They carried out unauthorised fund transfers from Whizdm Finance Pvt Ltd's accounts using Hong Kong and Lithuania–based IP addresses. These IP addresses were later traced back to the five rented servers," it said. PTI AMP SSK
