LUCKNOW: Sikkim police have arrested 16 fraudsters of which 15 belong to Uttar Pradesh for committing bank fraud by tampering with ATM and swindling off huge amounts of money.
Of the 16 conmen held in Gangtok, 11 belong to Kanpur, two to Hardoi and one each to Ayodhya and Rae Bareli. One of the gangsters is from Rajasthan. As the gang had been active in Sikkim for the last six months or more, in the months of March–April, such withdrawal refunds were in the range of Rs 15-20,000. In the following months, the refunds reached to the tune of Rs 15-20 lakhs.
As per the police sources, the arrests were made on August 30 following a complaint lodged by Sikkim State Cooperative Bank’s manager Ujjwal Sharma. In all, 70 ATM cards were recovered from the possession of the gangsters.
The case came to light when Gangtok police chief contacted the Kanpur police commissioner to seek criminal credentials of the hackers who had been active in the state.
As per the modus operandi, the conmen would insert the cards in ATM to withdraw an amount but before the transaction could be cleared, they would somehow tamper with the system to make it appear as though the amount was not dispensed.
They would then complain to the bank of the ATM that the amount had not been received. The bank concerned would then refund the amount and credit it in their account while they would still have the cash which they had already withdrawn fraudulently while tempering with the ATM.
Those arrested by the Sikkim police include Abhishek Yadav, Mohit Gautam, Rishi Kashyap, Abhijit Yadav, Mohammad Faiz, Manish Kumar, Manish Yadav, Vijay Sarkar, Saurabh Singh, Kishan Kashyap, Suraj Agnihotri, -- all Kanpur. Besides Surya Pratap of Rae Bareli, Satyanath Mishra of Ayodhya and Sachin Kumar and Abhijit Singh, both of Hardoi were also arrested along with Rajkumar Meena of Rajasthan.
The arrested conmen have been booked under IPC Section 379 punishment for theft, IPC 420 for cheating and dishonestly, to name a few.
The manager for SISCO (one of the banks that was targeted by the conmen in Sikkim), checked the CCTV footage of the ATM and lodged a police complaint. As per the preliminary report from SISCO Bank, around Rs 1.9 crore was refunded to these fraudsters in the past few months.
Sikkim Police’s Cyber Crime Unit was roped in for probe and it found that as many as 40 fraudsters had entered the state.
As per the police sources, while 16 fraudsters were held, 24 were still at large.
The sources said that the fraudsters didn’t know each other and were functioning in sub-groups, each group unaware about the other.