Srikrishna Ramesh known as Sriki, 26 have been found to be at the centre of an alleged Bitcoin-for-bribes controversy that has hit Karnataka politics in the last few weeks. One of the six hard disks that are recovered from his laptops has uncovered the data of a hack at the e-procurement cell of the Karnataka government wherein a hacker gang in 2019 stole ₹11.5 crore.
Sriki was arrested with an associate Robin Khandelwal in November 2020. The private cyber forensics firm Group Cyber ID Technology Pvt Ltd at the beginning of 2021 analysed the hard disks from laptops after the Bengaluru city cyber crime police in case of hacking of two poker gaming sites.
The cyber forensics reports revealed one hard disk “marked 01” from the Macbook contains “hacking data” for the hacking of the eproc.karnataka.gov site of the e-governance cell.
The e-procurement cell of the Karnataka government filed a complaint with the cybercrime unit of the Criminal Investigation Department that stated unknown persons had stolen ₹11.5 crore of deposits from the cell and mentioned that they were able to stop another theft of ₹7.37 crore.
By this, many other incidents of hacking Bitcoin exchanges and poker gaming sites came forward against Sriki and his associates. Sriki has claimed since his arrest that he and his associates were trying to steal ₹46 crore from an e-procurement cell but only managed to get ₹11.5 crore.
The hackers allegedly moved the money from the e-procurement cell to an NGO’s account in Nagpur and the account of a private firm in Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh.
It also uncovered the hacking data for poker sites PokerSaint, pppoker, Poker Baazi, for a Bitcoin exchange called Koinex and several other sites including food supply service provider Zomato.
The cyber forensic experts could access the hard disk of only two of six laptops seized from Sriki and his associate Robin Khandelwal. Three laptops could not be analysed due to encryption codes that could not be bypassed while one was damaged, according to the forensics report.
It just so happens; the equivalent digital legal sciences firm directed an examination of the information held in a cloud server by the programmer and observed that Sriki had as numerous as 76.13 lakh public locations/private keys for Bitcoins and upwards of 26 e-wallets. Sources said these might have been obtained by hacking or through information exchanging on the dull web as a feature of endeavours by programmer gatherings to take digital money.
One of the wallets in the cloud with 31 Bitcoins was at first shown by the programmer to the police as his own by giving just the public location and not the private key that is expected to get to the Bitcoins in the wallet.
The decision BJP in Karnataka has been addressed lately by the resistance Congress over the supposed vanishing of more than 5000 Bitcoins answered to have been in the ownership of Srikrishna (as asserted by the programmer himself) before his capture in November 2020. The Congress has recommended defilement including a couple of BJP pioneers and their kinfolk. The BJP has asserted that the programmer was related to the family of numerous Congress chiefs as well.
