more-in The Crime and Intelligence (C&I) wing of the territorial police has widened the net to nab more accused in the ATM fraud case detected here two days ago. The C&I wing had arrested Balaji and Jayachandran, local residents, on Thursday for using fraudulent means to obtain money from account holders in the nationalised banks. The modus operandi followed by the accused was to fix tiny skimmer machines, imported from China, to capture ATM data of customers. The accused claimed to have destroyed the skimmer machines, said an investigating officer. The duo placed cameras to capture the PIN of bank customers. After fixing the skimmer and camera, the accused would wait near the ATM and after a few hours they would remove it. The accused used BJM Enterprises, their own company, as a cover to procure Point of Sale (PoS) devices from banks. Armed with the data of the account holders, the duo used fake ATM cards and transferred money into their accounts by swiping the cards on PoS devices. They had been into this racket since 2015. They would withdraw money from the accounts in nationalised banks, said an officer. Investigators suspect that the case had inter-State ramifications as the sophisticated equipment used to gather the ATM data of customers of nationalised banks was procured by the accused using their network of associates. The immediate task before the investigators was to arrest Shyam and Kamal from Tamil Nadu. Both, with technical knowledge in collecting ATM card data through fraudulent means, seemed to have assisted Balaji and Jayachandran in transferring money to their accounts by swiping fake ATM cards on PoS devices. Tip of the iceberg Director-General of Police S.K. Gautam told The Hindu that he ordered the probe after a woman complained of ?6 lakh being withdrawn from her account all of a sudden. More details about the case could be gathered only after more arrests and further questioning of Balaji and Jayachandran, who have been remanded in judicial custody. The police would soon approach the court for their custodial interrogation, he said. “Several police stations here in the past have received complaints of ATM frauds. Now, we have to check all the complaints and correlate them and see if the same gang was involved in those cases. So, at present we cannot say how many bank customers have lost their money because of this gang,” he said. The modus operandi of the accused was totally different from the normal ATM frauds. The accused were technically savvy and had managed to make connections through various social media platforms, he said. Complimenting the team, Mr. Gautam said the C and I team cracked the case with all its limitations.

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