Gujarat: Ex-IT firm employee held for source code theft

The cyber cell of the police on Thursday arrested a former employee of an IT company for stealing the source code of the company. Interestingly, the company had no clue about the theft of the source code and had, in fact, approached the cyber crime cell after someone pretending to be an employee of theirs approached their clients in the US offering a better business deal.

Sandeep Modi, CEO of Inheritx Solutions approached the cops after his clients in the US started getting mail from the id of one of his employees Vishal Soni.

In the mail, Soni offered to do the same work as Inheritx Solutions for a much cheaper rate and claimed that many former clients of the IT company had moved to the service offered by Soni.

Investigations revealed that the mail id of Soni was created by a former employee Gaurang Pachani, 29, a resident of Gota. Pachani had worked with Inheritx from 2016 to 2017. Before quitting the company, Pachani had met with an accident and he was allowed to work from home. "For this, he was given a laptop. The laptop had the source code of various programmes. When Pachani quit he copied the same in the pen drive," said the cops in a release.

They said the company was not aware that the source code had been stolen.

Source code refers to the list of programmes, computer commands, design layout and analysis of the programmes.

Pachani originally belongs to Gondal and had done his MCA from Rajkot.

THE INTEL

Investigations revealed that the mail id of Soni was created by a former employee Gaurang Pachani, 29, a resident of Gota. Pachani had worked with Inheritx from 2016 to 2017.