this story originally appeared in on apr 25 2017by archana morein an unprecedented case of hacking and money laundering four persons in just 49 days hacked the unified payments interface upi app of bank of maharashtra bom to siphon off rs 614 crore from several accounts of 23 branches in pune district for investment in cryptocurrency bitcoin through three companies in ahmedabad gujaratpolice have frozen all three accounts of the companies which were involved in the transactions of bitcoin a virtual currency legalised in few countries but yet to get the reserve bank of india rbi nod the cybercrime cell of pune police recovered rs 458 crore from the accused which involved bitcoin of rs 1 crorebitcoin given its nature of encrypted technology is not regulated yet has high returns on investment attracting thousands of people worldwidebesides bitcoin cops also seized 40 cellphones and 27 sim cards from the accused and has identified jitendra maruti rindhe 42 sandip ashok mule 30 dipak sarjerao kharat 26 and rajesh janardhan budkhule alias soni 48 all residents of buldhana around 400 km northeast of pune as the accused in many cases their own accounts held with bom used the muchadvertised upi app to collect money from the accounts of the bank customers who did not even have the requisite balance they exploited a bug or loophole in the banks upi app developed by mumbaibased infrasofttech the accused also used real time gross settlement rtgs to send money received into another accountthe investigation revealed that the 50 accused had formed a chain of account holders of bom to commit the offence they also approached 15 farmers who are account holders of the bank and took their sim cards on the pretext that they will give monthly rs 5000 from the pradhan mantri jandhan yojana and pradhan mantri fasal bima yojanaon march 8 bom deputy zonal manager niranjan shripad purohit lodged an fir at shivajinagar police station under sections 66c punishment for identity theft and 66d punishment for cheating by personation by using computer resource of the information technology act 2000 and sections 420 cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property 120b criminal conspiracy and 34 acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention of the indian penal code ipc the investigation was transferred to the cybercrime cell due to the technical nature of the crimeduring investigation the cybercrime cell found that some of the misappropriated amount was transferred to various intermediary companies including zeb it services pvt ltd oracle retail pvt ltd and milton medocore pvt ltd all in ahmedabad after analysing the transactions related to misappropriation the investigation officer had put a debit freeze on the bank account of zeb it services pvt ltdcybercrime cell senior inspector sunil pawar told pune mirror rajesh budkule is the prime accused in this case we have found that the accused had formed a chainlike a multilevel marketing mlm system and approached farmers from narayangoan and junnar they took their sim cards