BENGALURU: Taking advantage of cyber security lapses in the co-operative bank sector, cybercriminals have tried to cheat a co-operative bank thrice in a week and managed to make away with `22.15 lakh. According to sources, Town Co-Operative Bank Ltd, Hoskote, Chinthamani Branch on February 26 fell prey to cyber criminals. An account holder, Sri Lakshmi Venkateshwara service station, had submitted a request to the bank to transfer `22.15 lakh to the account of HPCL retail maintained at HDFC bank in Mumbai, police said.
The request was approved by bank manager Anjinappa and the approved requisition was sent to the head office of Town Co-Operative Bank in Hoskote through email at 3.40 pm on the same day. But the email received by the head office under the same approved signature contained a different attachment of scanned copy having details of the beneficiary. The details of the attachment was totally different from what were actually sent by Anjinappa. The bank officials have told CID that the account holder banks with a State Bank of India branch located in Uttar Pradesh. The officials also suspected that their email ID was hacked.
Shankarappa, general manager of the bank, said, “After sending the email, Anjinappa called the head office and informed about the transfer. They have tallied the amount but not the account holder details which cost the bank `22.15 lakh.”
How Co-operative banks work
According to Shankarappa, “Generally, in huge money transfers, the local branch will not have the power to authorise. They will send the scanned copy of the filled challans to the head office who will transfer the money. The cyber criminals have hacked the account and are able to collect this information. They make a small change in the email and send it to the head office with a forged scanned copy of the challan.”
In the past week they have made three such attempts, for which the bank lost `22.15 lakh. In two other cases, we were able to save `29.20 lakh due to alert staff,” he said. He also said that they have not hired any agency to look after the security of their servers and online systems. Police officials said that they have been able to freeze the account and the suspects have been arrested in Lucknow.