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MUMBAI: Four current and former employees of a company tasked with storing and distributing digital content on a streaming app were arrested on Monday for the online leak of the fourth episode of the popular fantasy TV series 'Game of Thrones'.

Three of them, identified as Abhishek Ghadiyal , Bhaskar Joshi and Alok Sharma, are current employees of Prime Focus Technologies , while the fourth, Mohammed Suhail, is a former staffer.

During its probe, the Mumbai police cyber crime wing discovered that Ghadiyal allegedly passed on his admin user ID and password to Suhail, who in turn leaked the episode on a Friday, two days before it was due for global release on Monday. A direct link to the MP4 file was found on Star India's own distribution site, allowing people to download the episode for free before sharing it through other internet sources.

Mumbai police said, on August 4, Prime Focus Technologies lodged a complaint that it had stored the fourth episode of 'Game of Thrones' on its servers so that it could be streamed on Star India's Hotstar. But they learnt that somebody leaked the show before its release date.

The firm started internal inquiries and found out that only a few select senior employees were given the admin ID and its passwords for storing and processing the data on the firm's server. These internal servers can be accessed from Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata.

Ghadiyal works as a test engineer, and Joshi and Sharma are assistants to Ghadiyal. Police have invoked sections 408 (criminal breach of trust by clerk or servant), and 34 (common intention) of the IPC, as well as 43 (damage to computer, computer system, etc) and 66 (computer related offences) of the IT Act.

During further investigations of Ghadiyal's call detail records, it was found that he was in constant touch with Joshi and Sharma.

"We have arrested all the four and now we are going to interrogate them separately to know on whose instruction the episode was leaked, and who stood to benefit from it," a senior officer close to the investigation said.

