Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Incident:

A major cyber fraud was exposed when someone hacked into the official email ID of the Junagadh Range Cyber Police and sent emails to banks requesting the unfreezing of frozen funds. However, since the subject line of the email was left blank, one of the banks responded to verify the request, which led to the discovery of the fraud.

The investigation revealed that the emails were sent by an IT expert from Ahmedabad named Vishal Vanand, who is known to assist the police in cybercrime investigations. Upon interrogation, he admitted to sending the emails to get frozen funds released. Police are still investigating if others were involved in this scheme.

What exactly happened?

On May 3, staff members including PSI M.A. Joshi and V.M. Jotaniya of the Junagadh Cyber Police Station received a forwarded email from ICICI Bank that appeared to be from PSI G.B. Sisodiya of their own station. But during internal checks, the staff confirmed that no such email was sent from their side.

A technical investigation showed that the email included account details of a company named “Balaji E-Commerce,” where ₹20.44 lakh was said to have been fraudulently deposited. Similar emails were sent to other banks including SBI (₹30.92 lakh), Bank of Baroda (₹7.40 lakh), and Punjab National Bank (₹14.95 lakh), requesting the release of frozen funds. All the emails falsely used the name of a PSI from the Junagadh Cyber Crime unit.

Since there was no such officer named G.B. Sisodiya in the department, the Cyber Range Police alerted the banks to take no action.

Email ID of the Cyber Police was hacked

The hacker had accessed the official email ID of the Cyber Police by cracking the password. Based on the IP address from the emails, the police traced the origin to Ahmedabad, leading them to Vishal Vanand. After his detention and questioning, he admitted to sending the emails to unfreeze the funds.

Police sources said Vishal is trained in IT and has previously assisted police in cybercrime cases. He even claimed he helps the Raniip Police Station in Ahmedabad with such matters. Authorities are now probing whether others were involved in the plan.

How the police tracked the hacker:

Since the emails came directly to the Cyber Police from the banks, the police traced the original IP address used to send those emails. All four emails to different banks were sent from the same email ID and IP address. Using this, the police reached Vishal Vanand in Ahmedabad.

The twist: Those accounts were not frozen by Junagadh Cyber Police

Interestingly, the four bank accounts mentioned in the emails were never frozen by the Junagadh Cyber Police. Other agencies had frozen those accounts, and most of the banks involved are located in different states. This confirmed that Vishal’s use of Junagadh Cyber Police credentials was a complete fabrication.