The Karnataka Police recently filed a chargesheet against hacker Srikrishna Ramesh alias Sriki in a case involving the alleged hacking of the PokerBaazi online gaming website in 2018.
The chargesheet filed in a magistrate’s court in Bengaluru by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has brought charges against the hacker for fraudulent use of electronic identification under Section 66C of the Information Technology (IT) Act, and theft under Section 379 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). These crimes carry a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to Rs 1 lakh.
Sriki, 31, is accused of being the mastermind behind a multi-crore bitcoin hacking and drug trafficking scam in Karnataka. He is under investigation for hacking government and gambling websites, as well as for stealing bitcoins from cryptocurrency exchanges.
PokerBaazi case
In December 2018, Puneeth Singh, the owner of the gaming firm Baazi Networks Private Ltd, filed a police complaint stating that the KYC information of the firm’s customers had been hacked and that nearly Rs 67 lakh had been illegally transferred to the account of Infinzy IT Solutions Pvt Ltd.
The owner of the private company, to which funds were transferred, was initially investigated by the police. However, it was revealed after the arrest of Sriki in November 2020 in a case involving online procurement of drugs via the dark web that he and his associates were involved in illegally accessing the gaming site.
The Bengaluru police investigated his hacking activities and found that he had compromised the PokerBaazi website at the behest of his associates. The police said he had stolen sensitive data from the company. The hacker and his associates are accused of later approaching the gaming company owner with an offer to fix bugs in the website for payment of an amount of Rs 50 lakh.
Following the arrest of of Sriki, the forensic analysis of a hard disk of one of his laptops revealed hacking data for the PokerBaazi site as well as sites like PokerSaint, PPPoker, and several other sites, as per the police. PokerBaazi was informed about users losing funds after one user reported the illegal diversion of Rs 13 lakh.
Story continues below this ad
The company on verification of the complaint, found that on December 12, 2018, 11 transactions to the tune of nearly Rs 67 lakh was triggered from the company’s bank account in RBL Bank at Delhi through payment gateway “cash free” by altering the source code of the company’s website and also changing configuration parameters of the software programme.
The company found that the amount was credited into the account of Infinzy IT Solutions Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru. While a director of the private firm was initially accused in the hacking case, he was not named in the chargesheet, sources said.
Last year, the SIT questioned a former associate of the hacker who allegedly helped receive Rs 50 lakh from the PokerBaazi hack. The associate, Yashas Gowda, has also not been named in the chargesheet.
The Bitcoin and hacking scam in Karnataka
The Bengaluru crime branch initially arrested Sriki and his accountant Robin Khandelwal in November 2020 on charges of buying drugs online using Bitcoin. The case involving the purchase of drugs on the darknet ultimately led to the discovery of several cyber crimes in Karnataka, including a significant heist of Rs 11.5 crore from the state e-procurement portal in 2019.
Story continues below this ad
The police’s handling of the hacker cases under the BJP regime in Karnataka, following the arrests in November 2020, led to allegations of corruption by the Congress while it was in the Opposition until 2023. Police officials are alleged to have seized a significant amount of Bitcoin found in the crypto wallets of Sriki after his arrest in November 2020.
After the Congress came to power, it created the SIT on June 30, 2023, to probe the Bitcoin scam. The SIT has also accused Sriki and Khandelwal of involvement in a June 2017 theft of 60.6 Bitcoins, worth approximately Rs 1.64 crore, from the Unocoin cryptocurrency exchange in Karnataka. A chargesheet is yet to be filed in the case.