Police have booked a group of unidentified persons for allegedly tampering with a multinational company’s 200 white-label ATMs installed across 18 states, and fraudulently withdrawing Rs 2.53 crore from there.
Based on a complaint filed by the company, an FIR was registered against the accused at the Vanrai police station in Mumbai on Saturday. According to the FIR, the accused made 2,743 transactions with the help of 872 ATM cards to fraudulently obtain cash over three days, said police.
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According to police, the first fraudulent transaction was carried out on October 12, 2022, and it was reported to the company’s corporate team in Goregaon. The incident was initially investigated by the company and other contractual agencies involved, following which, an official from the firm’s management filed a complaint at Vanrai police station on December 20 that year, according to police.
Explaining the modus operandi, police said that the accused would insert a debit card and initiate a normal transaction. “As soon as the money reaches the dispensary shutter of the ATM, the second person — also present at the ATM kiosk — would pull the electric wire or LAN cable to create a technical failure,” reads the FIR. “By creating this error, the first person would pull and take the money out of the dispensing shutter. On the contrary, due to the technical failure, the machine fails to record the transaction and the money is re-credited to the customer’s bank account. Thus causing a loss to the company.”
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During the course of the internal probe, police said that officials from the said company learnt that Rs 2.53 crore was fraudulently withdrawn from companies’ ATM machines installed in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Punjab, and 10 other states between October 12 and October 14 last year. “The accused made 2,743 transactions of Rs 2,53,13,100 with the help of 872 debit cards,” reads the FIR. According to an investigator, “The amount withdrawn, number of transactions, and debit cards used came to light after the company officials checked the hard disk of the ATM machines and their records.”
It is also alleged that CCTV cameras installed inside the said ATM kiosks were tampered by the accused, before fraudulently withdrawing cash from the machines. “Due to technical issues or fraudulent activities, footage from cameras installed at these ATM kiosks were not available. Every ATM machine, however, has an in-built camera — called a pinhole camera — in which the face of the person making a transaction in the machine is captured. And the pinhole cameras of these ATM machines have managed to capture the face of the accused, which is now being submitted to police,” said the complainant in the police statement. After receiving the application, the Vanrai police conducted an inquiry, after which a case was registered against the accused under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Information Technology Act.
Senior Inspector Rampiyare Gopinath Rajbhar said, “The complainant company manufactures ATM machines. We suspect that debit cards used in the crime were obtained by opening bank accounts using bogus documents. We have registered an FIR, and are trying to nab the accused at the earliest.”
