Fraud hacks CA’s email and mobile, demands ransom in Bitcoins

The person demanded money in Bitcoins by threatening to circulate the complainant’s morphed pictures on social media.

Mumbai: A 48-year-old chartered accountant has filed a complaint with the police after an unidentified cyber-criminal informed him that his email account, mobile phone and laptop had been hacked, and he had the CA’s internet browsing history.

Fraud hacks CA’s email and mobile, demands ransom in Bitcoins

The person demanded money in Bitcoins by threatening to circulate the complainant’s morphed pictures on social media.

The Kandivali police has lodged an extortion case and started the probe. Cyber police are probing the case.

The complainant, who has an office in Fort, on Friday discovered the hacking of his email account and electronic gadgets after he received an email on his Hotmail account from his hacked e-mail account.

The email was sent by the hacker from the complainant’s e-mail account, making it clear that the sender had accessed his account.

According to the police, the cyber fraudster informed him that a few months ago he had purchased unauthorised access to the complainant’s e-mail account from a professional hacker, which the accused claimed is a widespread phenomenon now.

“The accused claimed that he had uploaded a Trojan virus on his e-mail account and since then he had accessed all the internet activities of the complainant, including those on social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. He also claimed to have access to his mobile phone and laptop. The accused also told him that he had copied the complainant’s photographs on his server to misuse them further,” a police officer said.

The accused went on to inform the CA that he had monitored the complainant’s internet activities in which adult websites were browsed. The accused threatened the CA that he would make a montage video of the browsed history of porn sites and asked him to transfer $960 (equivalent to ₹75,786) to his Bitcoin account in the next 48 hours. The accused also shared his Bitcoin account, the officer added.

The fraud threatened the CA not to tell anyone about this including the police, or else he would send the montage video of his adult site content browsing history to all the people in his contact list, which he claims to have got access to via hacking, the CA’s complaint stated.

The complainant realised that his devices had been compromised and filed a police complaint on July 23.

“The complainant CA’s email account was hacked, but he did not pay up. We have registered the case and further investigating it,” said Dinkar Jadhav, senior inspector of the Kandivali police station.