In Bengaluru hacker ‘Sriki’ case, ED seeks details of man who sent £ 75,000 to brother’s account

The counsel for the ED also stated that Sudarshan had not cooperated in providing the agency access to his email accounts which have details of communication with Patel, including emails sent in December 2021.

The ED told the court on Friday that Sudarshan had not been able to provide clarity to investigators on the source of the funds received in his account in order to ascertain whether it was the proceeds of any hacking crimes committed by his brother.

The ED counsel stated that the agency is trying to ascertain if stolen funds were laundered by using crypto-currency by the hacker Srikrishna, who has been named in a number of hacking cases, including the theft of Rs 11.5 crore from the Karnataka state e-procurement portal.

The high court has suggested that Sudarshan must cooperate in investigations of the money laundering case by providing details sought by the ED. The court has also asked the ED to produce documents of its communications for the issue of a Look-Out Circular against Sudarshan on the basis of which he was prevented from leaving India in January.

The ED is investigating accounts held in foreign banks by family members of 26-year-old hacker Srikrishna – arrested in Bengaluru in November 2020 and released on bail in April 2021 – as part of its probe into Srikrishna’s money laundering activities.

The ED is investigating money laundering cases against Srikrishna with regard to the July 2019 heist of Rs 11.5 crore from an e-procurement portal of the government of Karnataka as well as hacking into gaming sites in India and crypto-currency abroad.

The cases against Srikrishna have had political repercussions in Karnataka on account of the opposition Congress accusing the ruling BJP government and the police department of favouring the hacker after his arrest in November 2020. Srikrishna was initially arrested in a case of purchasing drugs with Bitcoins on the darknet.

The Congress party has questioned the disappearance of hundreds of Bitcoins that the hacker claimed to have in his possession prior to his arrest.

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Sudarshan, 31, an engineer in the Netherlands, was prevented from leaving India in January this year, following a visit to meet his family, on the basis of a lookout circular issued by the ED.

The ED has questioned Srikrishna and several of his associates, including the kin of several politicians, in connection with the money laundering investigations over the last year.

In a petition filed against the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Bureau of Immigration, and the ED, Sudarshan has said that he has been questioned on a few occasions by the ED in connection with an alleged scam involving his brother, with whose actions he is not connected.

“It is submitted that one Srikrishna, who also happens to be the brother of the petitioner, was allegedly involved in some scam. Pertinent to note that the petitioner has no prior information of such antecedent as he was not in India at the relevant point of time since his stay in the Netherlands for the last eight years,” says the petition.

The money laundering probe carried out by the ED has so far resulted in the seizure of Rs 1.43 crore of an amount of Rs 11.5 crore that was stolen by the gang from the Karnataka e-procurement portal.

Srikrishna, who has a degree in computer science from the Netherlands, returned to India in 2017. In a voluntary statement given to the police during the course of his police custody, Srikrishna stated he was involved in the hacking of the Bitfinex exchange with a hacking group he was associated with while studying in the Netherlands.

The hacker has claimed in statements given to the Bengaluru police that he hacked into the British Virgin Islands-based Bitfinex crypto-currency exchange in the year 2015-16. The FBI and other US agencies are investigating the theft of 119,754 bitcoin (valued at $ 4.5 billion at present) from the Bitfinex exchange in 2016.

In February this year, US agencies reported the detection of nearly $ 3.6 billion worth of the bitcoin stolen from the Bitfinex exchange in 2016 from US nationals Ilya Lichtenstein and his wife Heather Morgan after their arrest in New York. The US agencies have reported the recovery of 94,636 of 119,754 bitcoin stolen during the 2016 Bitfinex hack.