CBI acts on FBI tip-off, nabs Army officer’s ‘hacker’ son

The Central Bureau of India, in a rare case of acting in coordination with foreign agencies, on Friday acted on information from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to arrest a man from Pune who allegedly hacked over 900 e-mail accounts across the globe for clients ranging from individuals to corporates.

The CBI said it had cracked down on locations in Mumbai, Pune, and Ghaziabad on inputs from the FBI on the activities of Amit Vikram Tiwari, said to be the son of a senior Army officer. He was arrested for alleged violation of the Information Technology Act.

The raids are part of a coordinated action between China, Romania, the US and India. Tiwari was allegedly working for his clients through two websites - www.Hirehacker.Net and www.Anonymiti.Com - with servers located in the US, offering to access passwords of email accounts in exchange for a fee varying from $250-500. The payments were routed through Western Union and Paypal.

According to CBI sources quoted in the media, it surfaced during initial questioning that Tiwari hacked into 900 email accounts through February 2011-2013, of which 171 victims were Indians.

The agency says it is still probing whether national security was compromised by Tiwari's acts.

There is also apparently information that people linked with the lucrative Indian Premier League cricket tournament also tried to rope in Tiwari, but talks failed over payment issues. The agency is still verifying these claims.

Based on the FBI inputs, the CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry and carried out detailed ground work to locate Tiwari, who is not a first-time criminal – he was arrested by the Mumbai Police nearly 10 years ago on charges of cheating a credit card company.

After collecting prima facie evidence, the CBI registered two first information reports under the Indian Penal Code for theft, apart from violations the of Information Technology Act relating to identity theft.

The association of Tiwari with hacker groups in the US, Romania and China is still a matter of probe but it has become clear that some of his clients were based in these countries, media sources in the CBI said.

They added that while CBI was handling the probe and searches in India, the Department for Combating Organised Crime in Romania and Ministry of Public Security in China carried out operations in their countries.

The FBI has launched major operation against hackers located globally last year, as part of which Romanian authorities arrested a hacker known as Guccifer this week who was infamous for hacking into accounts of powerful leaders.