The 26-year-old is accused of hacking three bitcoin exchanges, 10 poker websites, and four other websites, including Government of Karnataka’s e-procurement website.
New Delhi: International hacker Srikrishna Ramesh aka Sriki, who is involved in various high-profile Bitcoin scam, stayed in lavish hotel in Karnataka and led an extravagant lifestyle. According to a charge sheet accessed by India Today, Srikrishna, who is missing since he was granted bail, relished expensive meals and took massages while on his stay in the luxury hotel. His expenses amounted to crores of rupees.
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The charge sheet also mentioned that there were huge transfer of online to Srikrishna’s bank account for three months (from May to July 2019). Srikrishna also paid hotel bills amounting to more than Rs 7 crore over the course of three years.
The multi-crore Bitcoin scam involving Srikrishna, had created a political uproar at the national level in 2021 and 2022. The alleged scam involves senior police officers and several politicians. Meanwhile, the Siddaramaiah-led state government is likely to hand over the case to the CID. Currently, the prime accussed in the Bitcoin scam, Sriki, has been evading the police, but a search operation to nab him is underway.
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Who is Srikrishna Ramesh?
The 26-year-old is accused of hacking “three bitcoin exchanges, 10 poker websites, and four other websites, including Government of Karnataka’s e-procurement website”.
As per Srikrishna’s confession to the police, he learned the basics of hacking at the age of eight.
He told the police that he had twice hacked Bitfinex exchange during his stay in the Netherlands.
“Bitfinex was my first big Bitcoin exchange hack. The exchange was hacked twice, and I was the first person to do so. The second instance was a simple spear-phishing attack which led to two Israeli hackers working for the army getting access to the computers of one of the employees, which gave them access to the AWS cloud account,” Ramesh had said in his statement to the police in 2019.
Hacker Sriki had swindled government portals of Rs 11.55 crore
In 2019, Sriki hacked the state government’s e-procurement website and succeeded in stealing Rs 11.5 crore, according to a chargesheet filed by the police in 2021. CID officials, who investigated the case, blocked 14 bank accounts of Sriki and NGOs involved in the irregularities and recovered Rs 1.44 crore from them. It was confiscated. He hacked the government portals and transferred the money to the bank accounts of the NGOs Udaygram Vikash Sanstha in Nagpur and Nimmi Enterprises in Uttar Pradesh. Investigations later revealed that Sriki had received money from the NGOs.
“We hacked this site in 2019 and made three separate transfers. Two of the accounts were given to me by Hemanth Mudappa for a total of Rs. 18 crore in one account and Rs. 28 crore in the other. Hemanth claimed he collected Rs. 2 crore from an entity called Ayub, whom I do not know. However, the CID claims that Rs. 11 crore was collected by Hemanth Mudappa,” he said.
How did the Bitcoin scam come to light?
On November 18, 2020, the Central Crime Branch (CCB) police arrested hacker Sriki in connection with the Sandalwood drugs case. It came to light that Sriki had purchased drugs through international dealers on a dark website by using bitcoins.
During interrogation, Sriki revealed that several websites had been hacked. The CCB officials had said that they had seized 31 bitcoins worth Rs 9 crore from Sriki’s crypto wallet. However, the then commissioner, Kamal Pant, said that no coins were confiscated and that it was alleged that the bitcoins in Sriki’s wallet were transferred to different wallets and that evidence was destroyed.
Published Date:July 6, 2023 10:12 AM IST
Updated Date:July 6, 2023 10:12 AM IST
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