Safety of mobile banking apps under scanner
Shubhadeep Choudhury
Tribune News Service
Bengaluru, January 12
The safety of banking apps on smartphones has come under the scanner after a gang was arrested by the cyber crime wing of the Karnataka Police on charges of hacking Axis Bank's mobile app "LIME" and using it for withdrawing money from Axis Bank ATMs.
The gang, according to the police, have also hacked SBI's app "Buddy" and have stolen money of customers living in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Axis Bank has stopped operations of "Lime" after the activities of the gang have been brought to their notice. Importantly, the gang members arrested by the police in connection with the case included a 30-year old deputy manager of the bank.
Gopikrishna, alias Gopi, deputy manager of Axis Bank branch at Peddapalli at Karimnagar near Hyderabad, has been arrested for conspiring with other accused persons and providing them with the account details of such customers of the bank in Karnataka who are having huge balances in their accounts.
The gang was caught when SR Narasimhan, who retired as chairman-cum-MD of NHPC, filed a complaint with the Cyber Crime Police Station in Bengaluru. The complainant stated that on December 4, 2015, the service of his pre-paid Vodafone mobile stopped all of a sudden. He later found that Rs 1,80,375 had disappeared from his savings account in the Axis Bank during the intervening night of December 4 and December 5. Narasimhan also learnt that his pre-paid SIM stopped working since the connection had been changed into a post-paid one while retaining the same number.
While investigating the case, the police arrested one Nageswara Reddy, the kingpin and his associates, and found that they had obtained duplicate SIM card of the complainant's mobile number registered with the bank from a Vodafone store by submitting fake documents and changed the plan from pre-paid to post-paid plan.
"Later, the accused transferred the amount (stolen from Narasimhan's account) to various mobile numbers using mobile banking and the LIME wallet option of Axis Bank and withdrew the amount from Axis Bank ATMs", MD Sharath, DSP, who headed the investigation in the case, said.
