Techie involved in Income Tax refund fraud arrested

Bengaluru: A techie who allegedly siphoned off huge amounts of money related to income tax refunds from the I-T Department into bank accounts “impersonating” those of original assessees has been arrested, police said on Monday.

The accused has been identified as Dilip Raje Gowda (32), allegedly a habitual offender against whom many cases have been registered in various parts of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa and Telangana.

The accused, a Bachelor of Engineering (BE) graduate, was involved in unauthorised accessing of sensitive information from government website portals serving the public, the Cyber Crime Division of the Criminal Investigation Department said.
“The arrested person exploited the vulnerabilities existing in the system and thereof siphoned off huge amounts of money related to I-T refunds from the Income Tax Department into the impersonating bank accounts of original assessees,” the CID said in a statement.

According to the CID, it received a complaint regarding some unknown person gaining unauthorised access into the PAN account of a victim and accessing the Income Tax filing portal to alter their IT returns to get refunds.

The fraudster altered the bank account details to which the refund should be issued by the IT department, it added.

Fake and fabricated KYC (Know Your Customer) documents were used to open the bank account in the name of the victim, the CID said.

“In the present case investigated, the accused person was successful in manipulating the I-T returns and (getting) a refund to the tune of Rs 1,41,84,360 credited to the fraudster’s bank account,” the CID explained.

Subsequently, a criminal case was registered and taken up for investigation, which was supervised by Superintendent of Police (Economic offenses Division) M D Sharath.

The team gathered information from various sources and identified the involvement of the accused person in six more cases in which he had already siphoned off Rs 3.6 crore, the CID said.

Based on the efforts made by the team and with technical support, the accused person was traced and arrested from Dharwad.
He is currently in police custody for further investigation and digital and traditional evidence related to the case have been seized from his possession, the CID said.

The accused is a native of Hirisave, Hassan District but is currently residing in Dharwad city.

Investigation has revealed that the accused was involved in several vehicle loan frauds also where he had taken money from a non-banking finance company and cheated it.

“The income tax authorities have been informed about the vulnerability in their systems and were requested to plug it. In the same way, ‘Kaveri’ online portal of the state government, which deals with property registration, was also misused by the accused person, and the same has been intimated to the concerned,” the CID said.