The CBI has booked four Delhi residents among five persons on charges of duping a US citizen by hacking into her laptop and swindling $4,00,000 which works out to ₹3,30,95,760 crore.
The sleuths, after registering an FIR, carried out searches at residences and offices of accused Praful Gupta, Sarita Gupta, Kunal Almadi, Gaurav Pahwa, all belonging to Delhi, and Rishabh Dixit of Kanpur and recovered incriminating material in the form of laptops, mobile phones, hard disks, among others, said CBI spokesperson.
The CBI said Lisa Roth’s laptop was hacked on May 21, 2022. When she contacted a number displayed on her compromised laptop screen, a person claiming himself to be a Microsoft employee responded and misguided her, revealed the CBI FIR. He told Roth that were some wire transfers from her retirement account and suggested her to contact ‘fidelity investments’.
Subsequently, as per the CBI, when she called again on the given number, she was instructed to transfer money from her fidelity investment account to a more secure account.
During the conversation, the caller gained unauthorised remote access of her computer and transferred $300,000 from her fidelity account to her account with First State Bank of America. The caller then opened an account with Binance.com on behalf of Roth and advised her to wire $300,000 to an account titled “Prime Trust” with Binance.com. Accordingly, Roth went to First State Bank and tried to transfer $300,000 to Prime Trust.
After a few days the money transaction was declined by Binance as she had wrongly written “Prime Title” in place of “Prime Trust” and the amount of $300,000 was returned to her First State Bank account, pointed out the CBI in its FIR.
The same caller again reached out to her and repeated same instruction but this time asked Roth to wire $400,000 to a secure account which he opened in an OKcoin account through the same modus operandi of discreetly taking remote access of her laptop.
On June 7, last year, she transferred $400,000 to her OKcoin account, falling for the trap laid out by fradusters. They converted the money into crypto currency and further transferred it into the Binance and FTX wallet addresses of the five accused.
Roth, realised that OKcoin was empty when she logged into it after a few weeks, said the CBI.