BENGALURU: In a financial fraud belying their education, an eighth pass plumber and 10th pass digital marketing employee, along with two other accused from Dubai, hired hackers from Hong Kong and stole around Rs 47 crore from a non-banking financial company (NBFC), operating from Bengaluru, recently.
Of the four accused, Sanjay Patel, 43, a plumber from Udaipur in Rajasthan, and Ismail Rasheed Attar, 27, from Belagavi who is the digital marketing employee, have been arrested. The Central Crime Branch (CCB) sleuths are now searching for the two other accused who are in Dubai. Of the Rs 47 crore, Rs 10 crore that was in mule accounts has been frozen. The gang had sent money to over 650 mule accounts.
The senior manager of the NBFC, located on Outer Ring Road in Marathahalli, had filed a complaint at the Cyber Crime police station on August 9, stating that between August 6 and 7, 2025, several unauthorised and suspicious money transfers had been done from the company’s bank accounts. The company investigated internally and found that the transactions had not been carried out from its official systems or registered IP addresses.
Accused hired Hong Kong-based hackers to bypass security software
Instead, they originated from foreign IP addresses, and the money had been illegally transferred from the company’s accounts to other bank accounts.
The CCB sleuths, who came into the picture, conducted further investigation and found that 1,782 transactions had been made from the company’s accounts and the money had been transferred to 656 different bank accounts. Of that, Rs 27.39 lakh had been transferred directly into the account of Patel. He was arrested on September 25 and remanded in judicial custody.
Rs 5.5 crore had been transferred into the bank account of a company in Hyderabad and later routed to the account belonging to another individual. It was discovered that the Hyderabad firm had initiated these transactions using IP addresses belonging to “Webyne Data Centre”, and those IP addresses had been purchased by another person.
On October 9, 2025, Attar was arrested for providing the IP addresses. He was in regular touch with the other two accused in Dubai, who had rented five servers. They had also hired Hong Kong-based hackers, who tampered with the bank’s API systems to bypass its security software and transferred funds from the Bengaluru company using Hong Kong and Lithuania-based IP addresses. These IP addresses were traced back to the five servers that had been rented.
“The money was transacted within two-and-half-hours. The two accused in Dubai are Indians and we have got their details. The finance company was giving loans up to Rs 5 lakh through the app, which was hacked,” Bengaluru City Police Commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh told the media.
The Cyber Crime Police Station has registered the case under the IT Act and other sections of BNS.