Gang swindles cardholders out of Tk 2 crore; four arrested
ATM card users are a new target of fraudsters as the use of plastic money is on the rise.
The Detective Branch of Police on Tuesday night busted a gang of four fraudsters for stealing around Tk 2 crore from automated teller machines (ATM) of different banks in Dhaka in the last two years.
Of them, two are IT experts at Mutual Trust Bank, one is from Advanced Data Network, and the other, who is suspected to be the gang leader, is a former employee of Aamra Technologies.
Sharful Islam, chief operating officer of Aamra Technologies, said three of the culprits were once colleagues at the IT company where they had learnt how card fraud takes place.
In June 2012, a credit card scam involving over Tk 10 crore was detected at the United Commercial Bank (UCB). The bank identified four of its top and mid-ranking officials, who withdrew the amount from the UCB using 21 credit cards between 2007 and 2012.
Rab personnel detained three persons at Uttara in the capital in April this year for burglary and fraudulent use of credit cards.
DB police last month arrested two persons for their involvement in credit card fraud in Dhaka. One of them is an IT expert, who was educated in England.
In almost all cases of debit and credit card fraud, it was found that bank employees were involved in those, either directly or indirectly, and they provided the fraudsters with information about clients.
However, many such cases have gone unreported, as Bangladesh Bank, the regulator of the country’s banking industry, has no mechanism to get information on this type of fraudulence. And it is yet to issue any security guidelines in this regard.
“We do not receive any such complaint from an aggrieved person or a bank,” said Mahfuzur Rahman, executive director and spokesperson of the central bank.
“Police will take action once this type of fraud is detected,” he said.
Bangladesh is a cash-based economy, and the use of plastic cards is a new phenomenon. Recently, there is a rise in the use of plastic money, so are cases of card fraud.
According to the banking industry, around 10 lakh credit cards worth $120 billion are active in the economy.
DB police said several gangs are involved in ATM card fraud in the capital, and they swindled many cardholders, using hidden cameras and other devices. They sometimes enter ATM booths of different banks with fake ID cards, and introduce themselves as IT experts of the banks.
They install a camera above the ATM machine to record the image of a cardholder typing the password, and fix a small device to the ATM card reader to copy the cardholder’s information.
The fraudsters then put the information in a new card with magnetic blank strips, using devices that can write and read cards.
With the help of unscrupulous IT experts at different banks, they also steal customers’ information from computers at ATM booths, using pen drives.
They then withdraw money from the booths or buy products from shopping malls using the cards and passwords.
“Fraudulence can take place even at the stage of issuing and acquiring cards [during purchase],” said Masrur Arefin, deputy managing director of the City Bank, the second largest credit card provider in Bangladesh after the Standard Chartered Bank.
Such cases of fraud happen when cards are given on fake information. In some cases, sellers of goods and services accept cards despite knowing that the buyer is not the real cardholder, he said.
“There is no alternative but to make shop owners aware of it to prevent card fraud at the acquiring level,” said Masrur.
He said his bank received complaints of credit card fraud involving around Tk 6 lakh in 2012.
Bitopi Das Chowdhury, head of corporate affairs at the Standard Chartered Bank, said they haven’t received complaints of any large-scale fraud involving bank cards.
He said the bank has a monitoring system to avert card fraud. “Even if there is any such case of fraud, victims can contact our call centre any time to deactivate the card,” he added.
Anis A Khan, managing director of Mutual Trust Bank, said the recent card fraud involving its two employees would not affect any of its cardholders, as none of the clients was swindled by the gang.
Referring to the arrests of the bank’s two staff on Tuesday night, he said the two IT experts had already been suspended.
Source: The Daily Star
For very mysterious reasons the govts have always been lenient on bank note forgerers, drug and gun peddlers and bank fraud masterminds. Is it because a section of the ‘powerful’ enjoy a good chunk of the booties? Or how a fraud, a forgerer, a drug & gun peddler gets bail so easily and many of them boast that jail-hazat or prison is their temporary abode where they check-in or check-out at their sweet will? In fact there is ample scope to doubt that the govt agencies somehow or other have clandestine understanding with them or they would have been behind bars for life or suffered capital punishment. Just take it in mind if one injects poison in your blood, what will be his punishment? Just like that those who are injecting venom through putting in counterfeit money into the economy, the blood of a nation, or drug the whole young generation to doom, they should also be either terminated or sent to life imprisonment. But no; maybe the beneficiaries are also there in the govt agencies or repetition of such cases could not have happened.