Man hacks into int’l travel portals, held
MUMBAI: A 28-year-old man from Madhya Pradesh and his two aides were arrested by Mumbai crime branch last week for hacking into the payment gateways of multiple foreign travel portals and fraudulently booking airline tickets for customers while making a ₹2-crore profit .
The police said the accused, Raj Parmar, pulled this off with a simple trick that exploited a loophole in these portals. “Parmar noticed these travel agencies added just one word, such as ‘successful’, to the URL after a passenger completed his/her payment on the site,” said inspector Manish Shridhankar of crime branch unit 7. Parmar would copy the URL at the payment stage and simply paste the keyword (‘successful’) after it to generate the ticket, without having actually paid the money, said Shridhankar. But Parmar would charge his customers.
Some of these portals were based in South Africa and Kuwait. Deputy commissioner of police (detection-1) Akbar Pathan said they suspect Parmar to have hacked into Indian travel portals as well. Parmar, police said, has been hacking into travel portals since 2017 and was trained by a professional from Gujarat.
The city police was alerted after a Mumbai resident, Ritesh Shah, approached them with a complaint in December 2018. Shah said he had asked a local travel agent to book a ticket to Goa but once he received it, he found many details — including the price — to be different.
Crime branch officials, suspecting a racket, started investigating the case by looking into the IP addresses and mobile numbers used to book tickets. They traced Parmar to his home state and arrested him after five months. Shridhankar said Parmar built a network of travel agents, promising them commission if they passed on customers to him. Theaccusedhavebeenremanded in police custody till Friday.