Karnataka Bitcoin Scam: Who Is Hacker Srikrishna Ramesh And What Is The Multi-Crore Fraud
The arrest of a 'hacker' by the Central Crime Branch (CCB) last year in connection with a case of drug peddling has opened up a pandora's box in Karnataka, with the emergence of a multi-crore bitcoin scam, that allegedly has the involvement of several top politicians in the state.
The Police had claimed that they had recovered 31 bitcoins worth Rs 9 crore from the accused, identified as Srikrishna Ramesh aka Sriki.
Who is Srikrishna Ramesh?
The 26-year-old is accused of hacking ¡°three bitcoin exchanges, 10 poker websites, and four other websites, including Government of Karnataka¡¯s e-procurement website¡±.
As per Srikrishna's confession to the police, he learned the basics of hacking at the age of eight.
He told the police that he had twice hacked Bitfinex exchange during his stay in the Netherlands.
"Bitfinex was my first big Bitcoin exchange hack. The exchange was hacked twice, and I was the first person to do so. The second instance was a simple spear-phishing attack which led to two Israeli hackers working for the army getting access to the computers of one of the employees, which gave them access to the AWS cloud account," Ramesh said in his statement to the police.
How he operated
Explaining how he managed to hack the bitcoin exchange, he said, "I exploited a bug in the data centre which gave me KVM (Kernel-based virtual machine) access to the server. I rebooted the server into GRUB mode, reset the root password, logged in, and reset the withdrawal server passwords and routed the money via bitcoin to my bitcoin address."
Ramesh also informed that he had hacked into the Karnataka government's eProcurement site in 2019.
"We hacked this site in 2019 and made three separate transfers. Two of the accounts were given to me by Hemanth Mudappa for a total of ?18 crore in one account and ?28 crore in the other. Hemanth claimed he collected ?2 crore from an entity called Ayub, whom I do not know. However, the CID claims that ?11 crore was collected by Hemanth Mudappa," he said.
"I initiated the second transfer of ?28 crores while sitting in the Himalayas. This transaction was presumably refunded because the government apparently got to know about the dubious nature of the transaction. I did not earn any profit from this; however, I did enjoy the proceeds of the crime by living in 5-star hotels and enjoying a luxurious lifestyle from the proceeds of the same," he added.
No savings
?He said, "I did not save anything. I spent around ?1 to ?3 lakh a day on alcohol and hotel bills on average. The price of bitcoin during the time of this hack was around USD 100 or USD 200, which I shared with my friend Andy from the UK."??
Political allegations
The case took a political turn last week after Congress accused the government is hushing up the scandal as it involves some BJP politicians.?
Congress general secretary Randeep Singh Surjewala alleged in a press conference in Delhi on Saturday that the size of the scam could be much bigger because just on two days on December 1, 2020 and April 14, 2021 illegal transactions worth Rs 5240 crore took place.?
He posed a series of questions to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and asked what was the role of Karnataka Chief Minister Basaravaj Bommai, who was the state's home minister when the scam took place.
Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, however, slammed the Congress party over the alleged bitcoin scam and said that the "issue had become bigger" because the Opposition did not probe the matter properly when it was in power.
On Monday, Siddaramaiah had asked the state government to provide adequate protection to Sriki, suggesting that his life could be in danger.
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