Karnataka Bitcoin scam: SIT reopens probe into 2018 hacking of poker gaming site

The SIT issued a notice on May 24 for the interrogation of Yashas Gowda, 31, a former associate of the hacker, in the Poker Baazi hacking case.

According to the SIT, Gowda was aware of the hacking activities of Sriki but still facilitated a crime by providing the bank account details of an associate for the transfer of Rs 50 lakh that was stolen from the poker gaming site by Sriki.

The Rs 50 lakh was allegedly collected by Sriki and an associate, Sunish Hegde, after it was transferred to the account indicated by Gowda.

Gowda was not arrested by the Bengaluru police although his name featured in a police remand report for the hacker. He claimed that Sriki wanted a bank account to deposit money that he had won through online poker games.

Gowda, who approached a special court for anticipatory bail after being issued a notice for appearance before the SIT last month, has claimed that he has been wrongly implicated by other accused in the case. His plea was rejected on June 10.

“Considering the nature and gravity of the accusation and other circumstances, he cannot be granted anticipatory bail,” the court ruled.

In December 2018, Puneeth Singh, owner of Baazi Networks Private Ltd, filed a police complaint saying the KYC information of his gaming firm’s customers had been hacked and that Rs 70 lakh illegally transferred to the account of Infizy IT Solutions Private Ltd.

The owner of Infizy IT Solutions Private Ltd was investigated by the police before it was revealed, following Sriki’s arrest, that the hacker and his associates were involved in illegally accessing the gaming site.

An investigation by the Bengaluru police revealed that he had hacked the Poker Baazi site at the instance of associates and that he had stolen the company’s data. The hacker and his associates are accused of later approaching the gaming company’s owner with an offer to fix bugs on the website for Rs 50 lakh.

Following the arrest of Sriki, the forensic analysis of a hard disk of one of his laptops revealed hacking data for the Poker Baazi site as well as several other sites like PokerSaint and pppoker.

Poker Baazi was alerted to the loss of funds by users after one of them reported the illegal diversion of Rs 13 lakh of funds. The company found that on December 12, 2018, eleven transactions to the tune of Rs 66,99,994 had been triggered from the company’s account in RBL Bank in Delhi through a payment gateway called Cashfree by altering the source code of the company’s website and the configuration parameters of the software programme.

The company found that the Rs 66,99,994 had been credited to the account of M/s Infinzy IT Solutions Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru, also accused in the hacking case along with its director S Somashekar.

Background to the Bitcoin scam in Karnataka

Srikrishna Ramesh and his accountant Robin Khandelwal were arrested by the Bengaluru crime branch in November 2020 on charges of buying drugs on the darknet using Bitcoin. The case led to the cracking of several cybercrimes involving the then 26-year-old hacker, including a Rs 11.5-crore heist from the state e-procurement portal in 2019.

The handling of the cases involving the hacker by the police under the BJP government drew allegations of corruption from the Congress when it was in the Opposition between 2020-2023. There are allegations of police officials grabbing a large cache of Bitcoin that was found in the crypto wallets of Sriki after his arrest.

Last month, the SIT arrested Sriki and Khandelwal after finding evidence of the hacker’s involvement in a June 2017 theft of 60.6 Bitcoin worth Rs 1.64 crore from the Unocoin cryptocurrency exchange in Karnataka.

The Congress government created the SIT on June 30, 2023—shortly after it came to power in May 2023—to investigate the Bitcoin scam from the BJP government’s tenure.