Man clears three passport applications from police-verification system

According to the police, the unknown accused had gotten access to the passport.gov.in portal created by the Ministry of External Affairs.

Mumbai: A case has been registered against an unknown person for allegedly stealing a login ID and password and clearing passport applications that had come to the branch for police verification.

The police came to know about the fraud as the applications had been cleared on September 24 – when the branch was closed. (HT PHOTO)

A case has been registered for forgery, forgery of valuable security, identity theft, cheating by personation by using computer resources, etc under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act, 2000.

According to the police, the unknown accused had gotten access to the passport.gov.in portal created by the Ministry of External Affairs.

“At this moment we know that three applications have been cleared by the accused by fraudulently logging into our system,” said a police officer. “Applications from Chembur, Antop Hill and Tilak Nagar police stations have been cleared by the unknown accused and positive reports have been submitted to the regional passport offices concerned to clear issuance of the passports to the three applicants.”

The police came to know about the fraud as the applications had been cleared on September 24 – when the branch was closed.

He added that they have checked the CCTV footage of the office for that day, but found nothing.

“The branch then wrote to a technology company in Delhi that handles the servers of the passport website and has also got the internet protocol (IP) address from where the login to the portal had happened illegally,” said the police officer.