MUMBAI: The first clue that Mumbai police’s Crime Intelligence Unit had about the psychology of the person threatening India’s wealthiest man came in the subject line of the third e-mail they sent to Mukesh Ambani’s office. ‘Catch Me If You Can’, it said, referencing Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film loosely based on the life of conman Frank Abagnale.
FILE PHOTO: Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries, speaks during a convocation at the Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University in Gandhinagar, India, Sept. 23, 2017. REUTERS/Amit Dave/File Photo (REUTERS)
The person threatening the Reliance Industries’ chairman was clearly a show off. Armed with that knowledge about a chink in their armour, the Mumbai police began the hunt for Ambani’s anonymous tormentor. Over 5 consecutive days, starting October 27th, Ambani’s office received emails from a Mailfence account threatening to kill the 66-year-old billionaire if he did not pay up. The demand for money which started with ₹20 crore escalated to ₹200 crore and then to ₹400 crore. The third mail also mocked the Mumbai police’s inability to catch the sender.
When he was eventually caught from Kalol in Gujarat, it turned out that the sender of those mails was not a hardened criminal but a 21-year-old third year student of B.com, Rajveer Khant, who wanted to show off his technical prowess to his friends. Khant, the son of a head constable with Kalol police, used a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to open a Mailfence account, otherwise unavailable in India, to mask his Internet Protocol (IP) address. There are only 500 users of mailfence in India but the Crime Intelligence Unit soon found that only 150 of them were in active use. After tracking the activities on all of them the cops zeroed in on one of them which had been recently set up. “We found that only this account was in use in the time that the Reliance Industries’ chairman got those threats,” said an investigating officer unwilling to be quoted by name.
“The next challenge was to identify the IP address of the device used by the sender of those emails,” said the officer. “Khant used to surf the dark web throughout the night. He used to shuffle his IP address from one country to another by changing Virtual Private Networks (VPN) masking his internet protocol (IP) address making it difficult for us to trace him,” he added.
However, while shifting from different services and virtual private networks, he briefly exposed his real internet protocol address to the cops who were scrutinizing his account 24/7.
The college student had created the account on Mailfence.com in the name of Shadab Khan. He later told the cops that he thought of the name while watching the Pakistani batsman of the same name during the Pakistan-South Africa match on October 27, the day he sent out his first mail to Ambani’s office.
Khant told the cops that he had been confident that the police would not be able to trace him as Mailfence does not share details of its users, and he had masked his Internet Protocol (IP) address.
The CIU, headed by senior inspector Milind Kate, also discovered during their investigation that the 21-year-old had sent a similar email to another top Mumbai industrialist demanding ₹100 crore. The industrialist who has not registered an FIR will soon be recording his statement in the case. “It appears that Khant wanted to challenge the police since he did not mention any account details for money to be deposited in,” said the investigating officer.
On Saturday, the same day they arrested Khant from Kalol, the Gamdevi police arrested a 19-year-old from Warangal, Ganesh Ramesh Venaparthi, who had sent a similar email to Mukesh Ambani demanding ₹500 crores. However, unlike Khant who went to the trouble of setting up an email and hiding his IP, Venaparthi sent the mail from his Gmail account. He later told the CIU cops that he had watched a television news report about the various threats to Mukesh Ambani and wanted to see what happens when one threatens India’s wealthiest man.
He and Khant are both in CIU custody and have been booked under Section 387 (Causing someone fear of death and grievous hurt in order to commit extortion) and 506 (2) of the Indian Penal Code which also deals with criminal intimidation. Punishment under these sections can extend to a jail term of 7 years.
E-Paper
