Chennai: An engineering graduate was arrested on Saturday for illegally using editions of Tamil magazines on his website and making money out of it by selling them online as a package at subsidised rates.
He mostly sold it to the Tamil diaspora audience and made several lakhs in subscription money. Cyber crime police arrested the man, identified as Anand from Tuticorin on Friday.
After engineering, the accused had worked in a major IT company before quitting it to run the aggregating website. According to the police, he was running a website, magnat.com in which he uploaded pdf editions of all Tamil magazines.
The website is now taken down. Managing director of Kumudam publications private limited, P. Varadarajan, had filed a complaint with the city police commissioner against the website following which action was taken.
In the complaint, it was stated that the website, magnat.com had pdf versions of their magazines and boosted the website in such a way that they made money out of the magazine subscription too. “This caused monetary losses to our publication,” the complaint stated according to the cops.
A special team was constituted and investigations revealed that subscription charges for the website, magnat.com were credited to the bank account of an engineering graduate based in Tuticorin.
Apart from Kumudham, he also had pdf versions of other vernacular magazines too in his website. “He was charging an amount less than the parent publications for the subscription and making money out of it,” an investigating officer said.
The accused was produced before the VI metropolitan magistrate and remanded in judicial custody.
