City trio behind Rs 42-lakh bank fraud nabbed

KOLKATA: Three men in their mid-30s ��� two of them with proven track records of bank frauds ��� had been using loopholes in the banking system to quietly siphon off lakhs of rupees from accounts of gullible customers for the past few months.
After playing a cat-and-mouse game for over four months, police nabbed the trio on Monday, but not before they had illegally withdrawn over Rs 42 lakh from nine bank accounts.On their list of possible targets were high-profile Kolkatans like actress-danseuse Mamata Shankar and restaurateurs Rajiv Kothari and Dipak Kapoor.
The accused ��� Suman Ganguly, Subhrodeb Saha Chowdhury and Rezzak Ali ��� have been remanded in police custody. Suman and Subhrodeb had joined hands in Presidency jail, where both were lodged in separate fraud cases.
Their modus operandi was as simple as it was brilliant. Suman, a former employee of Standard Chartered, had part of the bank���s database with him. He used this to select customers likely to have hefty bank balances. They would then call up an account-holder posing as a customer care personnel from the bank and make routine enquiries to generate information, explained a police officer. Having worked in a bank, Suman knew what questions to ask. After that, they would call up the bank, this time posing as the customer, and request a change in contact number. Some days later, they would call up the bank again and request a Netbanking facility. The PIN for the same would then be smsed by the bank to the changed number.
���After getting the PIN, they would get the money transferred to another account. They used a different cybercafe every time, making it difficult to catch them,��� said Jawed Shamim, DC, detective department.
The fraud came to light when Stanchart account-holder S N Bose discovered on March 17 that Rs 24.43 lakh had been withdrawn from his account. The bank then lodged a complaint with the Shakespeare Sarani police station. Police found that the money had been transferred to two accounts, held by Kamal Chowdhury and Santosh Verma. Chowdhury was picked up by police and interrogated.