ATM Fraud Alert: This Is How Teenagers Robbed Rs 1 crore From SBI, ICICI & Other Bank’s ATMs

Two fraudsters have been caught by the Nagpada police for cheating various banks of Rs. 1 crore with fake claims of ATM withdrawal failures. Nagpada police have arrested these two youths and recovered a shocking amount of debit cards from them – 52!

The names of the two scamsters are Asif Khan, 19, who hails from Rajasthan and Asmat Khan, 21, from Haryana. Allegedly, these two met each other on a social media platform. They extorted money from the banks through ATM kiosks – by initiating a transaction and then cancelling it mid-way.

Modus Operandi of the thieves

These two youngsters used to withdraw an amount of around Rs. 30,000 – Rs. 35,000 from ATM machines of banks. No sooner did the machine dispense the money, they would grab on the cash tray which resulted in the machine to malfunction or switch off totally. Then they would call the customer care of the respective banks and tell them that the transaction had failed.

Sandesh Manjarekar, the assistant inspector from Nagpada police station said that they would, “call the customer care of the bank and then tell them that they had withdrawn money from the ATM but the machine had switched off and that they did not get the money.”

They carried out these frauds across a period of six months.

Nagpada Police to the Rescue!

Santosh Bagwe, senior inspector of Nagpada police station said, “We had a tip-off that some people were going to carry out a robbery in an ATM centre. We detained them following which we learnt that they had cheated several banks.”

The banks failed to check the CCTV footage of the ATM kiosks, but the police were able to track down a lot of reversal entries in the fraudsters’ passbooks. The amount that was found to be wrongly obtained added up to around Rs. 1 Crore.

The police have booked both these youths under the charges of cheating, common intention and under Information Technology Act. A total of 52 debit cards have been recovered from the accused.

Both of them possessed bank accounts in several banks. IDBI Bank, Axis Bank, SVC Co-Operative Bank Ltd, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Payment Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Federal Bank, IDFC, SBI, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, PTM, Punjab National Bank, DG Bank, Central Bank of India and Union Bank are the banks who fell prey to these scamsters’ schemes.

Police have also been investigating if they thought of this idea on their own or was it suggested it to them by anyone.