Sleuths of the Special Task Force (STF) held three persons and claimed to have busted a gang which was hacking on-line billing system site of the UP Power Corporation limited (UPPCl) and thus benefiting the consumers. The said on-line crime had resulted into huge loss to the government exchequer so far.
Giving details of the above breakthrough here at STF head quarter on Friday afternoon, IG (STF) Sujeet Pandey said that the officials of the UPPCl detected that their on-line sites were hacked in Gorakpur and Varanasi districts respectively. They also found that the gang involved in the said illegal trade is tempering the bills to get the amount reduced thus they get good amount from the beneficiary while the Government corporation is incurring a huge loss due to it. He said that UPPCl registered cases under the IT Act in both the above districts (October 22, 2014 at Cantt police station in Gorakhpur and January 9, 2015 in lanka police station at Varanasi) and the senior official who were on the job to crack the case, had finally sought their help in identifying and arresting the criminals.
Pandey said that they put the ST|F team on the job which after close monitoring and electronic surveillance, they found use of two Mail-IDs and three user IDs, to commit the crime. He said that finally the STF team managed to nab three of the miscreants involved in hacking the UPPCl site on Friday morning. The accused arrested from Mahanagar in lucknow, were identified as Parvez, Pankaj Singh and Amit Tondon.
Pandey claimed that Parvez, who is an employee in HCl at Azamgarh, had created fake mail-IDs from cyber cafes in Bhadhurganj at Gazipur district and two cyber cafes in Mau. With the help of these mail-IDs, Parvez further created three fake user-IDs. later he used these IDs to hack the UPPCl site and reduced bills of half a dozen customers. later to expand his network, Parvez also inducted another HCl employee, Amit Tandon along with one Pankaj Singh, a broker in the UPPCl through which they tempered over hundred of bills having big amount so far.
Pandey further claimed during interrogation, Parvez revealed that he had completed Hardware networking course from New Delhi, and had joined HCl at Technical Expert in 2012. He had also worked for some time at Jaunpur division of UPPCl before shifting to Azamgarh division. Parvez confessed that during these postings, he learnt that how by used user-IDs of SDO or Executive Engineer of UPPCl, any bill could be easily changed through on-line. He also revealed the name of one more accused Sudhir Kushwaha, who was part of their gang.