International hacker's bitcoins worth 414.5 crore sold by RTC founder

Bengaluru: Robin Khandelwala, 34, founder of Robin Online Services (RTC), is accused of selling bitcoins (BTC) worth crores of rupees stolen by international hacker Sri Krishna alias Sriki, the information was revealed during CCB investigation.

The CCB police have filed an indictment at the 1st ACMM court, A detailed document of the business deal between Sri Krishna and Robin Khandelwal has been submitted.

The accused Krishna hacked websites and servers of money exchange agencies, from which he was making bitcoins. He gave the same bit coins to Robin Khandelwala and sold it to others to get money. The CCB has mentioned that he paid commission in return for selling his bitcoins.

It was easy for Krishna to loot bitcoin. But it was tough to sell them. On this backdrop, he became friends with Robin Khandelwal, as per CCB. Hacker Krishna has stated that he has made a Rs 8 crore deal with Robin since 2017. But there is a suspicion that there was more trading between both of them.

Krishna has an account in the cloud system, which has private keys associated with it. It is said that bitcoin will be returned using it, as mentioned in the list provided to court by CCB.

900 BTC traded in his first meet

Robin graduated from Goenka College, Kolkata in 2008 with a BCom degree. While preparing for Charted Account (CA) exam, he was looking after his father's rice mill. He started his own bitcoin business and he began running a own firm named Robin Online Services. He started buying and selling bitcoins by contacting people via Local BitCoin, Paxful, Remitano, Binance, Wazirux, Zeppai and other websites.

Krishna was introduced to Robin in 2017 via the Local BitCoin website. Sri Krishna claimed that his name was Daryl Harmon. He has a 900 bitcoin (market value of Rs. 414.05 crore as of 2 November 2021). He requested them to be sold. Robin agreed to it and started selling bitcoin one by one and paid money to the account numbers shared by Sri Krishna. For which Robin had obtained commission.

Later, Robin met Sri Krishna in Bangalore in 2018, He stayed with him for three days in a hotel. Krishna, who claimed to be an international hacker, and has said he has a lot more bitcoins. He promised to pay more commission if it was sold. Since then, business transaction between the both were good. The two were chatting only on Wickr and Messenger App. Robin was introduced by Krishna to others as his accountant and finance manager.

Also, CCB in its chargesheet had mentioned that Robin paid Rs 3.48 crore from his account to Shri Krishna's accounts, Rs 4.98 crore from Abhishek Jain from Hyderabad (via Hawala) and Rs 20 lakh from Mumbai's Sumit Agarwal was paid. A statement on this was given by Robin, and there is still a lot of confusion on this, is also mentioned in the chargesheet.

The accused Sri Krishna used a MacBook Pro laptop for hacking and for bitcoin transactions. The laptop slipped from his hand and was broken. Later, he started using Robin's MacBook Pro laptop for hacking and trading bitcoins.