Corrupt Practices Revealed, Cyber Forensic Vendors Playing Loot Games

First exposed by the team of whistleblowers which points to a nexus between bureaucrats, original equipment manufacturers and vendors. The cyber forensic software and tools are being sold to the state police, secret agencies, Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), law enforcement agencies and government bodies to investigate and examine cybercrime and other critical cases at manipulated prices as per the alarm raised by industry whistleblowers.

The Cartel is held responsible for inflating the price of the tender causing a big loss of the government. It is supposed that the prices have spiked up to 200% of the landing cost in India.

The Scam Details:

All the security agencies in India including the state police, defence and intelligence agencies are always trying to improve their digital infrastructure to combat technical cases of the cybercrime, cyber terrorism and spying, etc. The virtual battle of digital protection is equipped by the arms and ammunition of the latest cyber forensic softwares.

To receive these highly important cyber security equipment, different agencies call for the tender of companies to offer their latest technology. According to the whistleblowers these companies do have the Indian partners who have a hand with the corrupt bureaucrats to inflate the price of the products. In case, this is also to be remembered that most of the OEMs are UK or USA based.

Products for security purposes like the mobile forensics, computer/hard disk forensics, hard disk imaging, DVR tools, CDR TDR Analytics, MAC forensics, etc are among top used materials by the security and law enforcement agencies. Flabbergastingly these tools by the same manufacturing organisations are sold at different prices at different agencies and states. Prices of the tools are almost spiked up by almost 200% depending on the local vendors and the dealers. To qualify as the lowest bidder the vendors also arrange the supporting bids that quote more prices.

Whistleblowers have highlighted that two of the Indian vendors and an Israeli company are the masterminds behind the entire price rigging and bid manipulation process. They have changed the price on the government e-marketplace (GeM) portal as per their convenience. In cases where the purchases have been made not through the GeM website there, these vendors sell the same products at either double the price or much below the usual rate.

A team of whistleblowers are currently working to understand the scam and bring it in the eyes of the nexus to make it exposed and solved as soon as possible.

The investigation was conducted by the420.in.