To authenticate his fraud, Sharma also hiked the salaries of a few other employees and gave them promotions by changing their profiles in the database and also sent emails from the account of the head of the HR department.

But Sharma’s tryst with hacking didn’t last long and he was caught in the web of the Cyber Crime wing of the Punjab Police. He has been booked under relevant provisions of the Information Technology Act and remanded in one-day police custody by a Mohali court.

Belonging to a lower middle-class family, Sharma, who has studied only up to plus two, was employed with Dell Computers for his computer expertise. He was sacked from the company on September 20 on charges of misconduct.

“Five days later, Deepak hacked the database and also the official mail account of HR Department. After making the necessary interpolations in the database, he shot off emails to the employees from the account of HR head announcing promotions and hike in salaries. This, Deepak did in order to benefit himself by tripling his salary so that he could bargain a higher salary in another company. Also, he sent emails to others announcing their promotions so that nobody suspects his mischief,” said SSP (Crime) Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh.

Police officials said Deepak did this also to avenge his sacking. He was drawing a salary of around Rs 35,000 in Dell, which he tripled by hacking the email of the HR department.

The case had reached the police after a complaint suspecting hacking was lodged by Prabhakar Raju, a senior officer with Dell. Raju had alleged that somebody had made unauthorised access on the system and used internal mail ID of the Human Resource department.

Raju also alleged that he had noticed that some employees had been given promotion and undue salary hike by manipulating the system files. In this process, the salary of a particular employee was raised by 140 per cent which was unusual and undue. Many more such unauthorised transactions were made in the system.

“It has been established beyond doubt that Deepak committed all the manipulations. The police seized his home computer which was used to make these unauthorised changes. The motive behind this act was to take revenge for his removal from the company,” Vijay Pratap said.

The crime branch officials will now undertake the complete mapping of his computer and further investigations will decide whether there were any other accomplices.