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Bengaluru police have arrested three people for swindling Rs 1.3 crore from an ICICI Bank branch in Halasuru by submitting 18 fake court orders.
The suspects are Abhimanyu Kumar Pandey and Neeraj Singh, both from Delhi, and Sagar Lakura, from Rajasthan. Police say that the suspects used a unique modus operandi.
Lakura, the alleged mastermind, first created documents that declared him a government official in Karnataka. He then submitted these documents online at the Centre for e-Governance and obtained a government email ID (cb-crime-sog@karnataka.gov.in) from the Karnataka State Wide Area Network (KASWAN).
Using the same email ID, he sent 18 fake court orders to ICICI Bank's nodal email ID, directing to defreeze money frozen in various cybercrime investigations and transfer it to a certain account number.
Pandey contacted an employee of an ICICI Bank in Halasuru and requested a speedy transaction of the amount. The employee checked Pandey's phone number in the fake court order and transferred him Rs 1.3 crore, according to police investigations.
However, the bank later filed a police complaint following an internal probe.
The Central Crime Branch’s (CCB) cybercrime police traced the account that received the swindled money to Delhi and went there to arrest Pandey.
He confessed that his friend Singh, a sales executive at Axis Bank in Delhi, had helped him to open an account with the bank.
Following the arrests of Pandey and Singh, police arrested Lakura. Investigations revealed that Pandey was previously arrested by Ahmedabad police in another cybercrime case and was lodged in the prison, where he learnt more tricks of cybercrimes from other inmates.
Investigators believe that Singh had colluded with a bank employee in Bengaluru and knew the accounts frozen by ICICI Bank during cybercrime investigations.
The CCB has now reached out to KASWAN and suggested changes in some operating procedures that miscreants might exploit loopholes to get government email IDs.