CDR racket: 2 including ex-Army officer held

The arrested former Army officer has been identified as Captain D K Giri, who was running a detective agency with the name Sharp Detectives Private Limited, in Hyderabad. He was running the agency since 1978 and for the past five years, he was allegedly procuring the CDRs illegally.

Giri graduated from the Officers Training Academy, Chennai. He was commissioned in the Indian Army, in the 11 Gorkha Rifles, in 1972. In 1977, he left the Army and started looking after the work in the private investigation agency that was being run by his father, who is an ex-military officer. In 1978, Giri took over the charge from his father and since then he has been running the detective agency.

The other accused who was arrested by the police is identified as Ravi Reddy, who works in Giri’s agency. “The duo has been brought to Delhi and is being intensively quizzed,” said a senior police officer.

During the investigation, it came to light that Giri had expanded the agency and started operating in Pune and Maharashtra. The agency’s website claims that their agency has very strong network of super specialist agents in and around Africa, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Dhaka, Dubai, Europe, Gulf, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, Srilanka, UAE, UK, and USA.

In July, the Crime Branch busted another CDR case in which so far eight persons including a sub-inspector has been arrested. They have been accused of procuring call detail records illegally and selling them to customers for a hefty price. Many of the arrested accused are employees of detective agencies.

“Giri was procuring CDRs from Aniket Dhamale (25), who is a resident of Maharashtra who operates a detective agency — Chercheur Detective & Investigator, in Pune and Abhinav Kumar (35), a resident of Mumbai. Both Dhamale and Abhinav have already been arrested by the police in July,” a senior officer said.

“The team consists of investigators who have come from a variety of backgrounds like intelligence, law enforcement, government, information technology and the armed forces,” claims the website of the agency.

The accused persons had created a lot of email ids with various pseudo names and exchanged the emails with each other for transfer of CDRs, police said.