#FraudAlert: This app by Indian techie spoofs emails, steals money
In a shocking case, a 22-year-old Indian techie, Rupesh Bhandari, has been arrested for developing an app capable of spoofing emails and helping fraudsters steal money. The program has been used to defraud a number of unsuspecting people across the country but still remains accessible on the Google Play Store. Here's all you need to know about it.
App spoofed emails of companies, job sites
The app, Email Spoofer, does what its name suggests - spoof emails of banks, telecom companies, and matrimonial sites. A malicious actor could theoretically use it to mimic emails to pretend to be someone they are not and trick people into paying money or giving away their financial details. You'd see that an email has come from SBI, but won't know that it's fake.
One just needs sender, target email for spoofing
In order to use this app, one just had to enter the sender's email (the one to be spoofed) as well as that of the recipient (the target), along with the email subject and message. In fact, it even worked for official email IDs.
Police received several fraud reports, used them to trace Bhandari
Delhi Police Cyber Cell learned about the app when several victims claimed that they have been conned by banks, matrimonial, and job sites offering lucrative loans, dating and job offers. The companies denied those claims, prompting the Cyber Cell to look into the malicious emails and reverse trace them to Email Spoofer and eventually its developer, Bhandari, a UP native working in Bengaluru.
Bhandari had a stash of 1.5 lakh emails
Police arrested Bhandari for developing an app that led to so many frauds and found a stash of as many as 1.5 lakh emails on his laptop. "Some mails even show monetary transactions," a source told TOI. "However, we are yet to ascertain the money trail. The application could be misused for threatening activities, job applications, suspicious activities and impersonating people."
And, the app still remains on Google Play Store
Though the police have arrested Bhandari, the malicious app still remains available on the Google Play Store. Now, if you try using it, an error message of 'maintenance' appears on the screen, but we'd say Google should be more responsible in taking down malicious programs like these. Notably, this particular app (including its first version) has already raked in more than 100,000 downloads worldwide.
