ED attaches bank accounts of Nagpur, U.P. firms which received fund transfers from hacker

A 25-year-old hacker was arrested by CCB in November 2020

Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials attached ₹1.44 crore in cash lying in 14 bank accounts under the Provision of Money Laundering Act in a cybercrime case against Nimmi Enterprises and others, including 25-year-old Srikrishna, a hacker arrested by the CCB last November.

Srikrishna alias Sriki is known to hack online poker games to win money and Bitcoins online and use it to purchase drugs from the darknet.

The CCB arrested Srikrishna on multiple criminal charges, including hacking into private and government websites besides peddling drugs through the dark net . He is also the prime accused in stealing ₹11 crore from the State government's e-procurement portal in 2019.

ED initiated a money-laundering investigation on the basis of an FIR filed by the Cyber Crime Police Station, CID, Bengaluru, on a complaint regarding hacking and subsequent siphoning of deposit funds of bidders to the tune of ₹11.55 crore from the bank account of e-procurement cell, Centre for E-Governance, Government of Karnataka.

During the investigation, it was revealed that Srikrishna hacked into the Portal of Centre for E-Governance, Government of Karnataka and funds were diverted to bank accounts of NGOs, identified as Uday Grama Vikash Sanstha, Nagpur and Proprietorship, Nimmi Enterprises, Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh respectively.

Further investigation revealed that Uday Grama Vikash Sanstha, Nagpur, received funds into the bank accounts of various vendors and traders in the guise of business transactions without actual purchase or sale of goods.

Similarly, Nimmi Enterprises, Bulandshahar, Uttar Pradesh, layered the received funds into the bank accounts of various vendors and persons in the guise of business transactions and personal loans to show the source of the money received from the accused .

The accused Srikrishna is a resident of Jayanagar. After pursuing PU in Bengaluru, he completed his graduation in BSc in Computer Science from a university in Amsterdam.

With proficiency in hacking, he started hacking into government websites and websites of business houses and extorted money on the pretext of releasing the hacked data.

Apart from this, he, along with his associates procured hydro ganja through the dark web and paid the supplier with bitcoins, officials said.