Another threat email to Mukesh Ambani sent for fun, Mumbai Police arrests accused from Gujarat

A 20-year-old youth identified as Rajveer Khant was arrested by Mumbai Police’s Crime branch demanding ransom from Industrialist Mukesh Ambani and sending him a threatening email. A case was registered after the complaint was filed by a representative from Reliance Industries at Gamdevi police station in Mumbai under 387 and 506(2) Sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The accused sent five such emails threatening to kill Mukesh Ambani.

The first email was sent on October 27 with the email ID shadabkhan@mailfence.com to the official email ID of Industrialist Mukesh Ambani which read, “If you don’t give us 20 crore rupees, we will kill you, we have the best shooters in India.”

Sources said that the second email came on Mukesh Ambani's email ID from the same email account in which it was written, "U have not responded to our email now the amount is 200 crores otherwise the death warrant is signed."

Threat emails

In the third email, the accused increased the ransom from ₹200 crore to ₹400 crores. The accused had written in the email for the third time, “Now it has increased 400 crore rupees if the police can't track me, they can't arrest me that's why we have no problem killing you, no matter how good your current security is, but he is the only one of our snipers who can kill you.”

Five such e-mails were sent from the same account, following which the case was transferred to the Crime Branch. Both Mumbai Police and Mumbai Crime Branch parallelly started the investigation into the matter.

Crime branch begins investigation
Mumbai Police Crime Branch initially started the investigation and with the help of the cybercrime unit, traced the IP Address and the location of the accused. DCP Crime Raj Tilak Roushan said, "After the Industrialist received the threat emails, the case was parallelly investigated by our Crime Branch team. After the investigation, we traced the accused from Gujarat, Kalol. The accused is 20 years old and is a third-year student of B.Com."

Emails sent for Fun: Crime Branch 

Roushan further said, "The accused is a third-year student of B.Com, but had a keen interest in the field of Information Technology. He had done a lot of research. He had knowledge of the dark net and spent hours researching the topic. He had sent the email from a fake ID created in the name of Shadab Khan from MailFence.com. This is a kind of email domain that has multi-layered security, it's not easy to track such emails sent from such a domain but our Crime branch and the cyber-crime team continuously worked on this and traced the accused, following which the accused was arrested from Kalol in Gujarat."

The accused wanted to challenge Mumbai Police and committed the act for fun. "The accused did this act for fun as he wanted to challenge Mumbai Police and thought that he had enough knowledge and sent multi-layered shielded email to avoid being tracked. Hence he promptly mentioned “Catch me if you can”, and "Mumbai Police can't track and arrest me", but we tracked and caught him. He belongs to a middle-class family and is a college student. Action will be taken against him following the process of law. The process of seeking his custody from the court is underway."

Another Accused Arrested from Telangana
Meanwhile, Gamdevi Police also arrested one more accused in this case from Telangana. Ganesh Ramesh Vanaparthi, a 19-year-old resident of Warangal, was apprehended when the police tracked down the email's IP address. He had demanded ₹500 crore in a menacing email. Vanaparthi was then produced before a local court and remanded in police custody till November 8.