A digital marketing employee and a plumber have been arrested for hiring hackers and stealing Rs.47 crore from a non-banking financial company (NBFC), operating from Bengaluru.

Ismail Rasheed Attar, 27, from Belagavi, and Sanjay Patel, 43, a plumber from Udaipur in Rajasthan, hired hackers from Hong Kong to carry out 1,782 transactions from the company’s accounts and transfer the money to 656 different bank accounts in less than three hours.

Two other accused, part of the four-member gang, are absconding. The Central Crime Branch sleuths have confirmed that they are in Dubai and would be caught soon.

The cybercrime came to light when the senior manager of the NBFC noticed that suspicious fund transfers and unauthorised transactions had happened from the company’s bank accounts between August 6 and 7, 2025. It was found upon investigation that the money transfers had not taken place from the company’s registered IP addresses or official systems. They had originated instead from foreign IP addresses.

Of the hundreds of transactions, Rs 27.39 lakh was transferred directly into Patel’s account. He was immediately arrested and remanded to judicial custody. About Rs. 5.5 crore was transferred into the bank account of a company in Hyderabad before being routed to another bank account of an individual.

Attar, who had provided the IP addresses to the hackers, was also arrested. The accused in Dubai had rented five servers to carry out the crime. They both are Indians too, said the police. – editor@nrifocus.com