Over 30 people, mostly from the city's
Jadavpur area, have lodged complaints that a huge amount of money was withdrawn
during the past three days from their accounts by fraudsters, police said on
Monday.
Majority of the
complaints came from people who had used ATMs of private and nationalised banks
around Sukanta Setu at Jadavpur in the southern part of Kolkata.
The police
suspect that those behind the crime probably used automated teller machines
(ATMs) in Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida, though the debit cards were in the
possession of the original owners, a senior police officer said.
"As per the
complaints, several lakhs of rupees were withdrawn from ATMs using
some dubious method. These seem to be a matter of ATM skimming. We are
analysing the complaints. Fraudsters seem to have used some old data of
customers which they had gathered earlier," he said.
Nine complaints were lodged at Jadavpur Police Station on Saturday, a few were
received on Sunday while the total number reached 32 on Monday.
The victims were
mostly salary account holders.
Bank employee
Shyamal Karmakar claimed that he had received messages regarding withdrawal of ₹10,000
from his account thrice on Saturday though he had not used the card.
Barun Halder
alleged that his wife has lost several thousands of rupees in transactions
which were not done by anyone of their family.
"We have
not shared details of our account or our debit cards with anyone. We never at
any point of time shared any OTP (one time password). Despite that, we have
lost our money," Halder said.
The police
officer said the customers have lodged complaints with their respective banks.
Last month, West Bengal had arrested two Turkish and two Bangladeshi nationals
for allegedly stealing a few crores of rupees by skimming ATM cards of
thousands of bank account holders across the country.
The alert was
first sounded in Tripura, where around ₹1.19 crore was reported
to have been duped from ATMs between November 15 and 17, In August, city police
had arrested two Romanians from Indore in Madhya Pradesh in connection with an
alleged ATM fraud case.
The Romanians
were allegedly members of a gang involved in stealing data from ATM cards of
customers by using secret cameras and skimmers at cash dispensing machines.
Using the stolen
data, the gang members would prepare clones of ATM cards and used them to
fraudulently withdraw money from bank accounts of customers, police sources
said.
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