BENGALURU: The online citizen service of the Department of Stamps and Registration has been hacked into and the status of hundreds of property documents have been changed. The fraud came to light recently and a complaint has now been registered with the Cyber Crime Police. The primary suspects are about 20 people including sub-registrars and juniors staff.
Inspector General of Registration and Commissioner of Stamps Dr KV Thrilok Chandra, in his complaint, has alleged that some persons have unauthorisedly accessed the software and made changes to about 300 documents, causing huge loss to the state exchequer.
Speaking to TNIE, Thrilok Chandra said, “Our department software ‘Kaveri’ is integrated with ESO2 technology of the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj (RDPR) Department to help prevent any illegal layouts from coming up. In this case, based on information about the fraud, we investigated where the system integration was being bypassed and found that some persons have changed sale deeds as sale agreements as they don’t import the data. After tampering with it, they changed it back to sale deeds. This is the only way to bypass the software integration. After confirming the fraud, we have lodged a complaint with Cyber Crime Police.”
During investigation, Thrilok Chandra and his team monitored the changes being made for about 15 days and found that about 300 documents were tampered with.“We have taken immediate steps to plug all loopholes,” he said. With the help of the IT team, the IP addresses used to make the changes were identified. This, along with the tampered documents, have been provided to the police for investigation,”
he added.
According to an investigating officer from the Cyber Crime police station, the staffers working in sub-registrar offices are involved in the fraud.“We are yet to zero in on them. We have formed a team to crack the case at the earliest. The complaint has been taken up under the IT Act and IPC Sections 379 and 406 for theft and criminal breach of trust,” the officer said.
Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sandeep Patil said, “Some documents have been manipulated. The officials concerned have to take permission from their higher-ups before making any changes to documents. But in this case, documents have been changed unauthorisedly.
“For example, a sale agreement has been changed as sale deed in the software. They may have tampered with other documents like kathas too.We have registered one case now, but there are many documents which we will have to examine. We will nab the accused people soon.”