BENGALURU: The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) on Wednesday submitted its chargesheet against hacker Srikrishna alias Sriki and 18 others in the case of hacking and siphoning off Rs 11.55 crore earnest money deposit funds from the E-procurement cell, Centre for E-Governance, Government of Karnataka.
The charge sheet was filed under Section 420 of the IPC, Sections 43 and 66 of the Information Technology (IT) Act for hacking and data theft, among others. "Srikrishna had allegedly hacked the government portal on the instance of his friend and co-accused, who is a contractor, and had siphoned off Rs 11.55 crore," said informed sources.
Meanwhile, the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) is said to have written to the CID and Central Crime Branch (CCB) to share investigation details on the hacking of the government portal and the alleged Bitcoin scam in which Srikrishna is the main accused and has been charge sheeted by the CCB earlier.
The ED had, in August, provisionally attached Rs 1.44 crore in the case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
Srikrishna, in his voluntary statement (which has no evidentiary value) to the CCB, had reportedly confessed that he had first attempted to hack the e-procurement site of the State Government in August 2018 using a database attacking tool 'Salmap', but was unsuccessful.
In 2019, he had exploited a remote code execution vulnerability and got access to the bidder information and had downloaded all the files relating to the bids, Excel files, etc.