Two Nigerian nationals were arrested for swindling Rs.70 lakh from the account of a non-resident Indian (NRI) through e-banking after hacking the victim's email id.
Stanley Ransome Ogwu, 36, and Roland Chukwudi Alumona alias Lucas, 37, were nabbed from south Delhi Wednesday.
"Three laptops were recovered from them containing stolen date of more than 1.5 crore people," said P.S. Kushwah, additional commissioner of police.
The duo revealed their gang has a group of hackers who fraudulently obtain the email ids of various banks' customers.
The officer said, "They hack the emails by sending a Malware (a virus) affected attachment to all such ids."
"When a customer downloads the virus-affected attachments, it creates a parallel folder. Upon using net banking, all information reach the hacker who accesses the customer's bank account," Kushwah said.
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The hackers even got the customer's mobile number blocked so that he could not receive SMS alert.
"As soon as the number is blocked, the hacker would pass on details to people like those arrested in this case to transfer the money from the customer's account to various international and national bogus accounts," he said.
Police acted on a complaint registered Aug 9 by one Mohan of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu who now resides in Japan. Coimbatore police said Rs.70 lakh was debited from his NRI account of State Bank of India (SBI).
Sep 7, a joint team of cyber experts of Coimbatore police and SBI contacted Delhi police seeking their assistance in tracing the accused.
The duo disclosed they were involved in such criminal activities for the past many months and had cheated around 500 people by adopting same modus operandi.