Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch arrested A 20-year-old man for hacking into a ticket-booking website, manipulating the prices and booking tickets and purchasing items at a negligible price causing financial loss worth Rs 7.35 lakh to various companies.
The accused, identified as Amar Jagdish Theri, a resident of Haryana, the Magistrate court Tuesday and sent to two days of police remand.
Karan Natwarlal Chauhan (30), a resident of Chandkheda lodged FIR on August 20 against an unknown person who allegedly hacked the website of Global Garner Services that acts as a mediator company between ‘Ease My Trip’ and consumers for booking air tickets, hotels and more. Chauhan is one of the promoters of Global Garner Services.
Chauhan stated that around “45 bookings were done from different mobile numbers at different times…to different states of India and Dubai and more. However, against that, he find that the booker has deposited an amount of approximately Rs 45 in my account.” He also claimed that the false bookings cost him a loss of Rs 3.36 lakh.
the accused used hacking software to fix the bugs and later breached the website to do hotel bookings, air-ticket bookings and online shopping activities. Full payment was made to the vendor from the website administrator account.
The accused to buy items costing thousands of rupees for as low as Re 1 or Rs 2 and resell them to customers for higher amounts and earn revenue from that. The accused was earning around Rs 50,000 daily by exploiting the security vulnerabilities of various websites and using his hacking skills to purchase items from small shopping websites. He booked hotels in Delhi, and did it successfully for around one-and-a-half years.
Various devices and software tools used to hack the websites have been recovered by the police.