Unfolding a very interesting modus operandi of a unique cyber crime case where criminal was able to hack the google drive of victim, Auariya police successfully decoded the case and arrested a 21 years old BSc student, Dheeraj – son of Shrikrishan for this crime. The police is also investigating the victim because the said personal photographs also involved a third person and having such personal data on personal drives is also a crime as per IT Act 2000.
Prof Triveni Singh , SP Auraiya, shared the details – that on January 1, 2019, he received a complaint from a college student Nikhil Pratap Singh that he has been threatened by someone over WhatsApp and is asking a ransom money of Rs 30000/- . Considering the complexity of the case, he quickly aligned the surveillance and cyber police teams for the investigation and cracked the case in less than 5 days and arrested Dheeraj.
While investigating his complaint, police learnt that Dheeraj used a hacking trick to log into the victims personal accounts on phone. Dheeraj found the mobile number of the victim through a Whatsapp group called Hayat and then tried the same number as login details asked on gmail and facbook accounts. Using some of the personal details, Dheeraj could crack the password of victim on gmail. Followed by this, he accessed the google drive of victim where he found many of his personal photographs with some other friend. Because gmail was the default recovery email of the facebook account, Dheeraj could hack the facebook account of Nikhil and started sending messages to Nikhil’s contacts. He also got the contact details of Nikhil’s connects through google drive and gmail. Dheeraj had enough information and he ws sure that these photographs can be used to black mail the victim. Dheeraj then created a virtual WhatsApp number (+181912011472) using some free online services and sent a threatening message to victim with a demand of Rs 30000 that if he won’t pay the money, he would start sending these pictures to people on his gmail contacts. When Nikhil ignored these messages initially, Dheeraj sent some of his personal photographs as a proof to the victim and to his father and sister..
Nikhil had no option in hand so he approached police for help. Prof Triveni Singh took a quick action and aligned a cyber-police and surveillance team to investigate the matter. Police first recovered the gmail and facebook passwords of the victim and then traced out the IP addresses of the previous logins of his accounts. Within 5 days, police traced out the details of criminal’s mobile numbers and device IDs.
“In this case, as the password of the victim was very easy to crack, We should keep our passwords strong and different for different accounts” said Prof Triveni Singh , SP, Auariya
