The ATM at Kalamassery from where money was looted. | Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT

Within hours of registering a First Information Report (FIR) at the Kalamassery police station on an ATM fraud to the tune of ₹25,000, the Kochi City police tracked down a person suspected of having pulled off similar deceit in as many as 11 ATMs across Ernakulam.

The arrested is Mubarak Ali Ansari of Uttar Pradesh. A police driver who was part of the team, which was on the hunt for the accused, identified him boarding a bus to Eloor from Edappally Toll. He was nabbed from inside the bus.

The Kalamassery police had registered the FIR against an unidentified person on Thursday shortly after 11 p.m. on a petition lodged by an assistant manager of the Kalamassery branch of a private bank. As per the FIR, the accused had made away with ₹25,000 in seven separate instances through illegal intervention at an ATM at Premier Junction at Kalamassery between 8.45 p.m. on August 18 and 9.17 p.m. on August 19.

The bank authorities lodged a complaint after customers complained of having lost money from their accounts despite failed attempts to withdraw cash from the said ATM. The bank then verified the CCTV camera images and found the accused pulling off the fraud without any intention to hide his identity. CCTV cameras had shown him to be limping, and that also helped in identifying him.

The accused, the police said, had a rather simple modus operandi. “He had a scale-like instrument made of fibre that perfectly slid into the money dispensing slot of the ATM while remaining hidden from outside. It stopped the machine from dispensing the bills, and when the customers left under the impression that the withdrawal attempt had failed, he went in, removed the object and collected the money,” said Baby P.V., Assistant Commissioner of Police, Thrikkakara.

The police suspect him to have carried out similar ATM frauds across cities, including Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Mysore, and Mumbai, and are verifying whether he has cases against him.

While the police suspect similar frauds at 11 ATMs covering 140-odd suspicious transactions, sources with the private bank, which lodged the complaint, claimed that the accused had been to only three of its ATMs.

“The accused was in the habit of sending the stolen money immediately to the accounts of his wife and friends back home while retaining only enough for subsistence. So, unless he was caught immediately after the fraud, it was tough to recover the looted money from him,” said the police.

Our code of editorial values

Printable version | Aug 26, 2022 10:10:26 pm | https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/kochi-city-police-track-down-atm-fraud-suspect-within-hours/article65814845.ece