Mumbai: Engineer & hotel manager clone ATM cards after losing their jobs

MUMBAI: A mechanical engineer and a hotel manager are among three people arrested in an

ATM card

cloning racket.


This is the second such case in Mumbai where point-of-sale machines (card swiping machines) were used by fraudsters. The case came to light when the accused tried to purchase a mobile phone with a cloned card.

Dahisar police

have seized 250 blank cards that the gang had used for cloning, besides 40 cloned cards.


On June 21, police received a complaint that three men were trying to buy a phone with a cloned card at a store on SV Road. Investigation revealed that of the three, Akhil Shaikh, 48, and Raghavendra Shetty, 35, had been stealing ATM card data of bank customers for the past three months. The men had installed skimmers and micro cameras in various ATMs in Mumbai and Thane that would capture numbers and pins of customers’ cards. The

data captured

on these skimmers was then transferred onto blank cards. The cloned cards thus created were swiped through a POS machine which sent the victim’s money into a bank account operated by the gang.

“Deepak Karande, 41, the third accused, had floated a bogus company called “The Star”. He opened a bank account in a large private sector bank in Kolkata in his company’s name. The bank then issued him a POS machine for business activities. But the gang systematically misused the POS machine,” said a police officer.

From the Kolkata branch, the money is transferred to a second bank account opened in Nashik by the accused using fake documents. The money is finally withdrawn at Nashik. So far, the gang has duped 50 individuals of Rs 8 lakh between March and June this year. Shaikh, an engineer, and Shetty, a hotel manager, told the police they got involved in crime after losing their jobs to the pandemic.