Bengaluru: Sneaking in through bugged website, agent buys bike licence for 225 cars

An insurance agent took advantage of bugs in the website of Acko General Insurance and bought 225 fraudulent insurance policies to help his brother who is a used car dealer, police said.

Southeast CEN Crime police have arrested the suspect, Dharwad native Irfan Shaikh, 37, and are searching for his brother, who remains at large.

C K Baba, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast), said the fraud came to light after Acko started receiving claims from the owners of vehicles with wrong insurance policies.

“We will take action against all those involved in the fraud. If Transport Department officials are found to be involved, we will act against them, too,” Baba said.

Explaining the bug, the DCP said details of vehicle insurance policies bought through the Acko app could not be updated properly on the Parivahan portal of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. In particular, data sent from the Acko app to Parivahan did not specify whether the insurance policy was for a two-wheeler or four-wheeler. Unscrupulous elements took advantage of this, Baba said.

Acko doesn’t have any insurance agents and sells directly to customers.

Internal inquiry

An internal inquiry by Acko revealed that two-wheeler insurance policies bought online were being used for four-wheelers.

K J Jinson, an associate director at Acko, subsequently filed a police complaint. Police opened a case under IPC Section 420 (cheating) and the Information Technology Act on August 19.

A team headed by police inspector S T Yogesh tracked down Shaikh through the phone number and e-mail ID that he had used to purchase insurance in bulk.

How he did it

According to police, Shaikh’s brother bought about 140 used cars from a taxi aggregator in 2020. He wanted to convert these commercial cars (yellow registration boards) to personal vehicles (white registration boards). This required No Objection Certificates (NOC) from the Transport Department. By the time the conversion process was completed, the insurance policies had expired.

He didn’t want to buy new insurance policies by paying about Rs 10,000 for each vehicle. So he contacted his brother who knew that Acko sells insurance policies directly to customers. He also knew about the bug that helped manipulate the type of vehicle for which insurance was purchased.

Shaikh initially bought insurance for a couple of cars at Rs 700 apiece. He wanted to test the system. When there were no adverse results, he proceeded ahead and purchased insurance for all 140 of his brother’s cars. He later bought insurance for 85 more cars that were purchased from the same cab aggregator by people known to his brother. The insurance details were also uploaded to Parivahan, a senior police officer said.

Shaikh has been in police custody for four days and is being questioned about the involvement of others.