BENGALURU: This case is akin to a crime thriller or potboiler. The accused/perpetrators of cybercrime created a fake website of State Bank of India (SBI) and managed to hack the website of the bank to generate an OTP to make the complainant believe that he has, in fact, received money in his account. Again, they hacked the website of the bank to show the balance in the account of the complainant as Rs 225crore, and secured commission of Rs 7.15crore from the complainant, the Karnataka High Court said, refusing to quash criminal proceedings against four accused.
Justice M Nagaprasanna passed the order, rejecting the four separate petitions filed by them, questioning criminal proceedings initiated against them based on a complaint filed by Vinayak Kabadi from Gadag in 2022, under the provisions of the IPC and Information Technology Act.
The accused are Balajee aka Balaji Sha of Tamil Nadu, Seba Jeevan Sebaratnam of the United Kingdom, presently residing in Bengaluru, Vinay Kumar Agarwal of Bengaluru, and Silmia aka Silmya Fathima of Tamil Nadu. Some of the accused, who are leading lavish lives and investing the fraud money abroad, were also booked by the CBI.
“Investigation has revealed not an isolated lapse, but a concerted conspiracy allegedly replicated across states, involving the victim. The role attributed to each of the accused is neither vague nor incidental. The summary of the chargesheet painstakingly delineates the part played by each accused -- from the introduction and inducement to technological execution, to siphoning off and laundering of funds,” the court observed.
Additional State Public Prosecutor BN Jagadeesha submitted that the chargesheet clearly indicates that the accused created a fake SBI website, generated an OTP on the mobile phone of the complainant to make him believe his account had been credited with Rs 225crore. Believing the accused, the complainant transferred Rs 7.15 crore to the account of the accused, which is the only transfer in the case in hand, he told the court.
Creating the website sbicf.co.in
Kabadi was interested in establishing a sugar factory and was looking to raise loans for it. In October 2017, he is said to have visited a tile showroom at Indiranagar in Bengaluru, owned by Vinay Agarwal, who is said to have arranged a meeting with Niyaz at a star hotel in the city. Niyaz and Vinay are said to have assured him of getting a loan of Rs 225 crore.
They asked the complainant to come to Chennai to meet SBI officials at a hotel. Niyaz and his wife Silmia introduced Kabadi to Sebaratnam Jeevan and Krishnamurthy Balaji. All of them are said to have lured the complainant into believing they would get a loan from SBI and demanded a commission of 7%, to which Kabadi agreed.
Documents were transmitted to the accused. Further, an email was sent to the complainant, and Rs 49lakh was said to have been credited in his SBI account, opened on January 4, 2018. Another email transaction alert came from the website sbicf.co.in, informing him that Rs 115crore had been credited into his account, and again Rs 110crore was shown to have been credited. The total available balance showed Rs 225.49 crore.
Convinced with the balance being shown, the complainant paid Rs 7.15crore, which is 50 per cent of the commission amount. He then checked the account in SBI physically. On coming to know that he had been duped, Kabadi registered a complaint on July 16, 2022, with Chandra Layout police.