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Bank officials held for fraud - Times of India

Thursday, 18 March 2010 05:30

Times of India : Employees of leading banks may be involved in fraud worth crores in the National Capital Region (NCR). The claim made by A K Singh, SSP (Gautambudh Nagar) followed the arrest of seven persons on Tuesday for allegedly withdrawing money from other people's accounts after hacking into the classified information of a leading nationalised bank and using fake cheques. So far, the police have traced Rs 27 lakh which was fraudulently withdrawn from the accounts of two customers in east Delhi and Ghaziabad. ''Those arrested may be involved in several such transactions,'' SSP Singh said. Explaining the modus operandi, superintendent of police (Noida City) A K Tripathi said one of the accused Pradeep Rastogi was employed with Punjab National Bank at Minto Road near Connaught Place. Rastogi was a computer operator and had access to the central banking system (CBS) data of the bank which contain highly-secure personal data and signature specimens of customers, the police said. Rastogi used to click pictures of customers' signatures and other personal in formation on his mobile phone and pass them on to his gang members. "Another accused, Usman, who has a computer centre at Zafarabad in northeast Delhi used his scanner and printer to forge the signatures of the victims,'' said Tripathi. The gang had access to such personal information that they knew the exact cheque book which was in possession of the victim at that particular time. They would pick up a number from that cheque book and superimpose it on another cheque of PNB before forging the signature. This cheque would be then deposited at several other banks where they had already opened fake accounts. ''Since these cheques were not deposited with the parent bank - that is PNB - most of these banks could not find out whether the superimposed cheque number was fake or not. Mere photocopies were usually sent by these banks to PNB to ''crosscheck'' if the cheque was genuine. Thus, they were never caught,'' said Tripathi. The police said the accused also doubled up as verifications agents of leading telecom service providers. ''While on the job, the accused would ask for extra photographs and specimen signatures from clients. These were later used to open fake accounts in which the victim's money was deposited,'' said Singh. The police said so far two women - one Indubala Arora from Kavi Nagar in Ghaziabad and Janak Kapur from Krishna Nagar in east Delhi - have reported a total loss of Rs 27 lakh. Indubala had just retired as a nurse from a hospital in Delhi and had received Rs 7 lakh as provident fund pay-out. Janak had sold her house and the accused had cleared her entire Rs 20 lakh leaving a few thousand for her. ''Indubala had come to Noida sector 18 for shopping and while checking her account she realised that all her money had gone. She lodged an FIR at the sector 20 police station on March 16. "We received information that some people with fake bank cheques will be assembling at a sector 20 park to divide their booty. We arrested them around 7 pm,'' said Singh. Besides Usman and Rastogi, the other fraudsters have been identified as Devilal, a contractor from whose Noida sector 26 Corporation Bank account the police found transactions worth Rs 10 lakh, Yashwant Singh, Imran, Javed and Chandra Shekher. ''Most of them were employed with banks as verification agents and knew the loopholes in banking,'' said Tripathi.