Mumbai Police held cyber criminal in Rs 34 lakh fraudery

Cyber Crime Police of city crime branch arrested a man for allegedly hacking emails of the bank customers and siphoning Rs 34.14 lakh from their accounts through RTGS transfer by submitting fake documents. The arrested person has been identified as Azharuddin Khan alias Atif Khan, 26, a resident of Ganesh Nagar in Kandivli (W).

The police probe revealed that Khan is part of a huge organisation specialised in man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack fraud, involving Nigerian nationals. MitM is an attack where the attacker possibly alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other.

According to the police, the complainant is a manager who works in the NRI Branch of the bank. As per the complaint, an NRI couple, who have NRI savings account in the bank used to communicate with the bank through emails whenever they wanted to do any transactions. The bank received an email from the couple's email ID on November 18, 2013, stating that a sum of Rs 5 lakh should be transferred to a bank account mentioned in the email.

Police said that the bank sought confirmation from the account holder by emailing the scanned copy of the letter received by them. The bank soon received a confirmation email urging them to make the money transfer soon and email the receipt of transaction.

The payment was made by the bank on November 21. This resulted in series of emails from the same mail ID requesting them to transfer money to other accounts. From November 21 to December 11, 2013, at least six RTGS transfers of Rs 34.14 lakh were made by the bank.

"The complainant got suspicious and called up the customer to inquire if he had made requests to the bank for money transfers. The NRI customer, then told the complainant that his email ID was hacked and he had not made any communication with the bank since November 19," said a crime branch officer.

Later the bank received another email from the same mail ID requesting the bank to transfer Rs 5.90 lakh in another account to which the bank did not processed. The bank then got a complaint lodged with Cyber-Crime Police station in Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC).

"Some of the wanted persons in the case have been identified as Ashish Sharma, Bajrangilal Soni, Arjun Gupta, Andy and Kenneth. While Nigerians were believed to have hacked the customer's email, others involved were beneficiary account holders. Khan has similar cases registered against him at Vishakhapatnam police station, MHB Colony police station and Malabar Hill police station," said the officer.