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A LOCAL court has convicted 11 persons for their involvement in the Rs 94-crore malware attack on Cosmos Cooperative Bank, which has its headquarters in Pune.
Those who have been convicted are Fahim Shaikh and Mohammad Saeed Iqbal Hussain Jafari of Bhiwandi, Fahim Khan and Shaikh Mohammed Abdul Jabbar of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Mahesh Rathod of Nanded, Naresh Maharana of Palghar, U A Waz alias Anthony, Bashir Ahmed and Feroz Shaikh of Mumbai, Abdulla Shaikh and Salman Baig of Thane.
The malware case was one of the biggest cyber attacks on an Indian bank at the time, when several cloned debit cards of Cosmos Bank were used for thousands of ATM transactions from India and 28 other countries in a period of seven hours on August 11, 2018.
While around Rs 78 crore was withdrawn in more than 12,000 ATM transactions outside India, another set of 2,800 transactions of Rs 2.5 crore were made in different places across the country.
Further, on August 13, 2018, more Rs 13.92 crore were transferred to a Hong Kong-based entity using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) facility. The transactions outside India were done through Visa cards, and those in the country through RuPay cards, the police investigation revealed.
A total of Rs 94 crore was siphoned off in this case, which was registered at the Chaturshringi police station under sections 120B, 420, 467, 468, 469, 471, 34 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and relevant sections of the Information Technology Act.
During their investigation, the police arrested 18 persons from different locations for their alleged role in the cyber attack. The police said that one of the accused had died and 17 are lodged in prison.
According to the police, most of those arrested were mainly involved in withdrawing money from different ATMs using cloned cards of Cosmos Bank, as per instructions from handlers. The police suspect that the racketeers gave them part of the money that they withdrew as commission.
In December 2018, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the case filed a 1,700-page chargesheet against nine accused. Later, two supplementary chargesheets were filed against nine more accused.
On April 15, a magistrate court in Pune convicted 11 accused persons, stated a press release issued on Sunday by the cyber police station in the city.
According to the press release, among the 11 convicted, Fahim Shaikh, Fahim Khan, Shaikh Mohammed Abdul Jabbar, Mahesh Rathod, Naresh Maharana, Mohammad Saeed Iqbal Hussain Jafari and Anthony were held guilty and awarded simple imprisonment of four years and seven months.
Abdulla Shaikh and Bashir Ahmed were awarded four years simple imprisonment, while Feroz Shaikh and Salman Baig got three years simple imprisonment, the release said.
Meanwhile, four other persons are still wanted in the case, of whom three — identified as Kunal Shukla, Abdul Bhai and Sumer Shaikh — are suspected to be in Dubai, the police said.
Following the malware attack, the Pune City Police and Cosmos Bank succeeded in getting back Rs 5.72 crore that the fraudsters had transferred into a bank in Hong Kong.
