PUDUCHERRY: In the sensational ATM fraud case having international ramifications of interstate criminals, the CB-CID sleuths on Wednesday finally arrested Chandruji, a key accused in the case who had been absconding since the police cracked the case.
Chandruji, a resident of Muthialpet was secured from Chennai at noon today after tracking his movement pattern from place to place that included Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and other places, said Rahul Alwal, Senior Superintendent of Police (Karaikal) who is directly supervising the investigations by dint of his technical knowledge (B.Tech in Computer science from IIT Mumbai).
Chandruji confessed to supplying POS machines to main accused persons from Tamilnadu, A Peter, 38 from Tirupur, S Dhinesh, 33 from Coimbatore and Irfan Rahman, 33 from Kolathur, Chennai for the purpose of swiping cloned ATM cards prepared by them using the credit or debit card data.
The data was bought on internet using bitcoins at the rate of 4 US dollars per card and wrongfully earned crores of rupees. They converted that money into both movable and immovable properties.
The cloned cards have also been used for airline travel, said Alwal. Most of the data purchased by the three are of people from foreign countries. So far investigations revealed that the victims are from USA, Saudi Arabia, UK, Japan, Sweden, Italy.
Investigations have confirmed 136 victims from foreign countries and four Indians, but none from Puducherry, said Alwal. The victims do not get an SMS alert once money is transferred from their accounts, since the SMS alert system is available in India only.
He said that while the basic data of the card number, expiry date and the name of the card holder are obtained through skimmer machine , while the CVV is obtained through the web when the victim would have used the card on online shopping or booking tickets through insecure connection by the international gang of criminals.
They store it online which cannot be accessed by normal browers. These sites can be accessed only by Tor browsers that protects the anonymity and is self-contained (portable), he said. Websites with an onion extension is one such example, he said. Only while selling a small portion of the data is available through normal browser for a few hours and hence the actual location of the criminals behind is not known, said Alwal.
Since PIN or OTP is not required in transactions of foreign countries, the money gets easily transferred once the card is swiped.
The SSP said that police is planning to take the assistance of Interpol and various other agencies in cracking the crime. So far 16 persons have been arrested in the case, who are from Puducherry and Tamilnadu, out of that five are out on bail. SSP said that statements from the victims are required to have a strong case to prosecute the offenders, but the victims are not coming forward as the lost amount is refunded by the bank to the victims.
Now the bank needs to come forward to give their statements in the case.