The hunt for the phishers who managed to embezzle more than Rs 5 lakh from the AP State Road Transport Corporation’s accounts, continued on Thursday as sleuths of the central crime station (CCS) managed to track a few IP addresses at Tarnaka and in some other areas.
A senior police officer revealed that four or five people may be the perpetrators of the scam. Cyber crime officers managed to make headway in the case after checking logs from Abhi Bus, the company which created the software for RTC.
The online fraud could have been avoided had the RTC not stopped the one-time password (OTP) security system in its software. The passwords of all accounts, right from the top to the bottom in the RTC, are changed everyday to avoid such frauds from ocurring.
“Citing delays in transactions, the RTC management requested us to stop the OTP and we deleted it from the software in February,” explained Sudhakar Reddy, CEO and founder of Abhi Bus, at a press conference here on Tuesday.
Reddy said that his company had prepared the e-ticketing software two years ago and had been providing them assistance with the same. “Out of the Rs 5 lakh plus amount siphoned off, only Rs 2 lakh has been withdrawn by the online thieves,” he said, adding that his company was only responsible for creating the software and was in no way responsible for manning it or to looking after its security.