Making the first arrest in its probe into irregular applications for deletion of names from the voter list of Karnataka’s Aland Assembly constituency ahead of the 2023 state polls, the Special Investigation Team of the Karnataka CID has arrested a 27-year-old man from West Bengal.
Aland in Kalaburagi district was one of the two constituencies mentioned by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi at a September 18 press conference where he alleged electoral fraud and “vote chori”.
Bapi Adya, who once ran a mobile repair shop in his hometown, was arrested Wednesday night from the Ghuguragachhi-Hanskhali region of Nadia district of West Bengal and produced in a local court in Bengaluru Thursday.
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In a remand application seeking Adya’s custody for 14 days, the SIT said he was arrested around 10 pm Wednesday at his village in West Bengal after the money trail for payments made by a Kalaburagi data centre for receiving One Time Passwords (OTPs) to illegally access the online portal and apps of the Election Commission of India led to the youth.
The SIT told the court that Adya provided “OTP bypass” services for the vote deletion activity. He was arrested after investigations revealed Rs 700 was credited to his bank account from the account of a data centre operator in Kalaburagi – through a website called OTPbazaar – for every “OTP bypass” provided to access the ECI’s online services using fake identities and phone numbers for the purpose of illegal voter deletion requests.
The trail of the debits from the bank account of the data centre operator by the OTPbazaar website “was going to an IndusInd Bank account belonging to Bapi Adya through a BharatPe payment gateway,” the SIT stated in its application.
Technical analysis of mobile phone data linked to Adya revealed that he was in Nadia district and an SIT team was sent to locate and nab him, the SIT informed the court.
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Its investigation into the Aland case revealed that OTPs from the ECI were given to as many as 75 phone numbers that registered with the ECI’s online services for placing requests for deletion of voter names in Aland in 2022-23.
Police sources said the 75 phone numbers from 17 states, which were used to illegally access the ECI online services through the OTP bypass services of ‘OTPbazaar’, belonged mostly to people who were unaware of the misuse of their phone numbers to access the ECI services. Over 3,000 fake numbers were put down on deletion applications for 5,994 voters of Aland, sources said.
“The OTPs from the ECI were being received almost instantaneously by the illegal vote deletion operators in Kalaburagi without the knowledge of the actual users of the phone numbers used to register with the ECI,” police sources said.
Following Adya’s remand in police custody for 12 days, the SIT hopes to find out how he was able to trigger the “OTP bypass” for the ECI online services. The SIT has seized two laptops and a mobile phone from Adya.
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Adya’s father Probir Adya said, “We do not know why he has been taken to Bengaluru since we live in UP and visit him in Bengal only for a few months every year. He usually moves around all the time and is not at one location. He works with computers and was running a mobile repair shop earlier.”
Following Rahul Gandhi’s allegations about illegal Aland vote deletions, the ECI introduced an Aadhaar-enabled OTP authentication system to access its online services – for voter deletions, additions and changes.
