The Hindu : CBI catches e-mail bomber

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Mar 24, 2002

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CBI catches e-mail bomber

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI MARCH 23. In what is described as the first cyber crime case of e-mail spamming from India, the Central Bureau of Investigation here has booked a teenage school dropout for allegedly bombarding a Britain-based company with thousands of e-mail messages asking it to shut down a website being hosted by its server.

On receiving the complaint from the web-hosting company that it was being "bombarded'' with junk mail from India, the CBI's Cyber Crime Investigation Cell traced the sender of the mail to Pondicherry and identified him as a school dropout addicted to the Internet.

The accused allegedly had threatened the company that he would keep sending similar mail besides porno mail to force it to delete its website account, the officials said.

They say the spam e-mail had occupied tremendous space — four megabytes — on the company's server, forcing it to block the mail server and mail accounts for a couple of days, thus causing losses to the company due to inability to transact any other business online.

The CBI found that the accused was in the habit of spending long hours on the Internet and was also working on a few websites. The teenager had lost contact with his school friends and had his own world of virtual friends with whom he stayed in contact through the Internet, the officials said.

The accused at one point had developed a relationship with the company but fell out later for various reasons, it was stated. It was to take "revenge'' that he chose to send the junk mail, according to officials. All this while the boy's parents believed that their only son was an information technology wizard and went on investing heavily on him.

Their monthly telephone bill often crossed Rs. 13,000, it was stated.

The CBI has registered a case against the teenager under Sections 507 and 509 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and has seized one of the computers allegedly containing a ready-to-use e-mail bombing programme.

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