ED searches on sons of Karnataka Congress MLA casts spotlight on 2017 Unocoin crypto exchange hacking probe

Internal sources suggest political sensitivities have hampered the SIT’s progress. “The filing has been delayed because names of kin of Congress leaders emerged during the probe. The current government is wary of naming its own supporters,” a source previously involved in the investigation said.

However, Home Minister G Parameshwara recently informed the legislature that the SIT is finalising the chargesheet. While some SIT officers claim there is no “concrete evidence” linking the leaders’ kin to the original 2017 crimes, others insist the paper trail shows they enjoyed the stolen proceeds.

“We are in the process of finalising the chargesheet in the 2017 Tumkur case on the basis of the evidence available,” an officer in the Bitcoin SIT said recently (before the ED searches) while refusing to comment on the evidence of the roles of the sons of Congress leaders.

“The names of the kin of some Congress leaders and others have emerged, but these cases occurred nearly 10 years ago, and there is no concrete evidence to link money flows to the hacking crimes of Srikrishna,” a Bitcoin SIT officer said.

However, a police officer who was earlier part of the probes into the Bitcoin hacking cases said that evidence had emerged in the Unocoin case to suggest the proceeds of cryptocurrency stolen by the hacker Srikrishna were enjoyed by the kin of Congress leaders.

The duo of Mohammed Haris Nalapad and Omar Farook Nalapad, sons of Shantinagar Congress MLA NA Harris, and Aquib Khan were named by the ED on April 20 as close associates of Sriki and alleged primary beneficiaries of proceeds of crime under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

“I question the timing of the raid. This is not to target my brother or me. Their target was my father, and it was to make sure that he missed an opportunity to be in the state Cabinet,” Mohammed Haris Nalapad said on April 21 in a reaction to the ED searches, which he said were done five years after the filing of a complaint.

Incidentally, the Karnataka Bitcoin SIT and the ED had questioned Mohammed Haris, Omar Haris, and Aquib Khan in 2024 and 2025 about their financial transactions with the hacker Srikrishna, who was first arrested by the Bengaluru crime branch police in November 2020 in connection with a case of buying drugs on the dark web using Bitcoin.

Probe around luxury car purchase

The SIT, which the Congress government in Karnataka set up in July 2023 to probe allegations of police and political corruption during the BJP tenure from 2019-23, the investigation of hacking cases of Srikrishna, has also questioned Rishab S, the son of senior Karnataka IPS officer Ramachandra Rao, who was also associated with Srikrishna.

The SIT and ED’s probe into the association of the hacker Srikrishna with the Haris brothers and the grandson of Rahman Khan has centred on a Rs 57 lakh Porsche Macan car bought from a showroom in Bengaluru in January 2018 and returned within a month for a refund. The car purchase occurred soon after the Unocoin exchange hack in July 2017.

Bank documents show Sriki’s accountant Robin Khandelwal transferred Rs 57 lakh to a Bengaluru dealership to buy the car for Aquib Khan. Barely a month later, the car was returned to the showroom under the pretext of being “damaged”. Refunded amounts were reportedly funnelled back to Khandelwal, Aquib Khan, and Rishab.