Four held for ATM fraud

Four inter-state ATM fraudsters were taken into custody by the Kochi police in connection with several such fraud cases on Friday.

The accused are Ashish Arora, 27, Sumit Kumar Arora, 28, Sunny Gupta, 27, and Ramadeep Singh, 30, all from Ludhiana.

The gang had siphoned off Rs 5.48 lakh from five ATM centres in the city.

According to the police, the racketeers had used ATM cards of ICICI Bank to swindle money from Federal Bank ATMs here. The Kollam police had recovered more than 500 forged ATM cards from the fraudsters who misused the automatic reverse system in ATM centres.

“The automatic reverse system is programmed to deposit the stated amount back into the account if the user does not take the currency notes from the ATM slot within the prescribed time.

The gang used to enter an amount for withdrawal and when the transaction was processed, a few currency notes were left back in the slot. The machine, falsely detecting that the amount was not taken back by the user, remitted the whole amount back in to the account. They conducted the operations five times this year in the city on April 15, April 22, May 20 and May 21,” investigating officer and Circle Inspector Suneesh Babu said.

The police official said that the fraudsters had visited the state once in two months and targeted the ATM centres in the different cities here. Twenty four cases have been registered  against the gang with the Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Alappuzha, Ernakulam and the Thrissur police.

To take the first and second accused Khuldip Singh and Sumit Gupta into custody, a police team will travel to Punjab. Both the persons are already in the custody of the Punjab police in connection with another fraud case.

The major banks in the country have stopped the automatic reverse system in the ATM centres after several such cases were reported across the country.