His first victim was a Mumbai credit card firm

Sandip Kolhatkar & Chaitraly Deshmukh

Hailing from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, Amit Tiwari’s name first cropped up in the year 2003. At that time, he was a second year engineering student and was caught red-handed while trying to defraud a Mumbai-based credit card processing company to the tune of Rs9 lakh.

Unfortunately for the young hacker then, he was caught in a trap laid by the company with the help of Mumbai police and he was arrested under a cheating 

case of Section 420 of Indian Penal Code.

Officials of CC Avenue, the company that he tried to defraud, refused to comment, but he was then granted bail looking at his age. Even though Information Technology Act, 2000 was in place, the chargesheet had no mention about the credit card fraud clause. After being granted bail, he had to remain present before the police station once a week. It is believed that he may have got off the case later, but as a result, he had dropped out of studies as he had earned disrepute due to the case.

Later he is believed to have started his own business of hosting websites from a posh apartment in Koregaon Park area. On the webworld, there are several web portals and blogs that warn people against conducting business with Amit Tiwari. A detailed account of how he defrauded CC Avenues is followed with descriptions of the alleged companies that he ran, i.e. seoways, ppcways, shieldreputation.com, Aleksei Malkov, technospider amongst a few mentioned on these blogs that accuses Tiwari of cyber stalking, hacking, cyber lotto amongst other things.

Despite his “reputation”, he managed to maintain his privacy and operated clandestinely as not many in the closely knit hacking community also have much knowledge about Tiwari except a few bits of information that they gleaned from time to time.

But many in Pune believe that this may be a front for the murkier deals that are done by a few from the hacking community. 

One of the city-based cyber crime experts said that in 2010, a woman approached him through Skype to hack into her husband’s account which he denied without police consent.

“Later she told me that a company run by a person called some Tiwari did the job for her and charged about $450. After a few months, there was one more person who told me that a similar job was done by a person of the same name in Koregaon Park. I was curious to know about this person and now realise that he may be the same person. Most people say he never came out openly, and used various names and even decoys like matrimonial detectives through which he got such jobs,” he said.

Another hacker based in the city said that after the 2003 incident, in which he had allegedly defrauded CC Avenues, he was labelled as the infamous hacker and after being jailed once, he went on to the wrong path.

“His capabilities were extraordinary and he could have used it for good purpose. There is an infamous hacker group called Russian Business Network. While there is a general perception that the group is closed, we believe it may be active and the arrested person (Amit) may be one of the members,” he said.