BHUBANESWAR: Last month, a city-based government official was defrauded of Rs 36 lakh in a fake courier scam. Investigation by the Commissionerate Police (CP) led to arrest of five persons from Karnataka, Assam and Tripura who were part of a Chinese cyber crime gang.

Police seized 23 mobile phones and two laptops from the five. Initially, the scam appeared to have been planned within the country. But, after a detailed examination of the seized devices it was found to be the manual of Chinese cyber criminals.

Helping the police dig deep into the case was a group of 10 IT and engineering students who found the fraud’s masterminds were based out of China. They assisted the police examine about 173 mule accounts and the investigation continued for a month. The probe found that mule bank accounts were opened and used in three to four different layers.

“We helped the investigators collect details about these accounts and determined that the ill-gotten money was used to buy cryptocurrencies and eventually taken outside the country by scamsters operating in China,” said 19-year-old Abinash Nanda, a second year B. Tech (computer science) student or CV Raman Global University.

While police have their own set of limitations given the workload, manpower and IT training, the summer interns at the Commissionerate Police have played the perfect partner for the cops in the fight against cyber crime which is exploding by the day. From detailed examination of electronic devices which play a central role in cyber analysis to devising new apps, the internship program has become a great success for Commissionerate Police while giving the interns great hands-on knowledge.

In the fake courier scam, the interns retrieved data from the gadgets to unearth every sensitive information related to the case and provided the investigators with many crucial leads which reduced the burden on the forensic lab and cut down on the processing time.

Subrat Swain (22), a 4th year B. Tech (information technology) student of IIIT-Bhubaneswar who is part of the internship program, said it was a challenge for them to examine all the seized devices as they consisted of hundreds of chats and several dubious files. While examining the devices very closely, the students found two accused from Tripura had hidden some APK (or android package kit) files in their mobile phones.

Further verification revealed the APK files were generated from servers in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

“The APK files were generated by scamsters based out of China and sent to Indian operatives to access all the information from their as well as mule bank account (bank account used to receive and transfer funds acquired illegally on behalf of others) holders’ mobile phones ,” said Swain.

During the internship, another B. Tech (computer science) student of IIT-Bhubaneswar, Nagi Reddy, 21, developed an application which can detect the IP addresses of the cyber criminals sending malicious links to target the citizens. The application can also detect the websites which are genuine and the ones that are fake, he said.

That was not the only case. The interns also helped the cops in a complex abduction case of a woman which eventually turned out that the victim had faked it. While working the case of Smruti Rekha Pani’s kidnapping, police found out that the woman may have been behind the plan to extort Rs 1 crore from her brother as ransom.

During the investigation, the interns helped the police in developing a masked link for WhatsApp to crack the case within 24 hours last month. Deploying the masked link on the WhatsApp number of the accused, police tracked the whereabouts of the woman along with her accomplices.

Police Commissioner Sanjeeb Panda said from over 640 applications from different parts of the country, only 10 were selected. “We selected the applications based on qualification and interest of the students. This program is suited for students who want to pursue a career in cyber crime or related fields,” he said.

Encouraged by the program’s results, the CP has planned to launch a winter internship program for the students. ACP Anjana Tudu, who supervises the interns, said they go through basics of information security (social media/emails/websites), network security, application security, ethical hacking, cryptography, cyber laws, incident response, digital forensics and cyber attacks.