City residents fall prey to ATM, credit card frauds

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 21 

Gullible city residents continue to fallprey to ATM and credit-card frauds. The cyber crime investigation cell of the UT police frequently receive complaints, and a majority of the cases remain unsolved. 

Sources said around a dozen complaints of ATM fraud have been received by the UT police in the last few months. 

In all the cases, the victims are duped through a specific modus operandi, where swindler call people posing as bank executive or customer care employee and fetch all personal details of the account holder. 

In a recent incident, a 75-year-old man, a resident of Sector 38, was duped of Rs 47,000. The fraudster posing as a bank executive transferred money from the victim’s bank account to a Paytm account.

In another incident reported in April, Pankaj Kumar, a Dhanas resident, was shocked when transactions of Rs 25,000 were made from his Punjab National Bank account. Two transactions of Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 were made from the account in Delhi. The victim claimed that he never received any call from any swindler asking for his bank account details. 

In March, Arvind Rana, a resident of Sector 28, received a call from a fraudster, who posed as a bank executive. The fraudster asked the victim for his ATM details claiming that he would be issued a new ATM pin. The victim revealed all information, including the one-time password (OTP) received on his mobile phone and a few minutes later; found that four transactions worth Rs 86,000 were made from his account in Delhi, Gurugram and Mumbai. 

Sources said the cops had failed to nab the fraudsters in majority of the cases. 

A police official said that since the mobile numbers from which calls were made to the victims are taken on fake identities, locating the accused was pretty tough.