Ex-Navy sailor among 4 held

Our Correspondent

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Gurugram, March 17

A four-member gang that was involved in ATM card fraud in NCR has been busted. They were produced in a city court on Tuesday and sent to three-day police remand.

The mastermind is former Indian Navy sailor Ankur Panwar. He is proficient in speaking English and recently cleared his UPSC Main exam.

According to the police, the accused were identified as Ankur Panwar, a native of Kharak Kalan village in Bhiwani district; Amit Kumar, a native of Najafgarh in Delhi; Jogender Kumar, a native of Sanwar village in Bhiwani; and Himmat Singh, a resident of Gadoli Kalan village in Gurugram. Jogender is an employee of a subsidiary company of Axis Bank, Delhi branch.

A Fortuner, two laptops, 209 mobile SIM cards, card writer machine, 159 cloned cards, four mobiles and Rs 5 lakh cash were seized from them.

The four-member gang cloned cards of customers, especially of Axis Bank, and duped hundreds of them of over Rs 2.5 crore in the past 45 days. DCP (East) Chandramohan said that Ankur was a habitual offender who had duped many people through a fake call centre in Delhi.

After the Mumbai Police arrested his previous gang leader Anil Dagar, Ankur stopped operations from Delhi and started afresh in Gurugram.

In January 2020, the accused started operating from a Malibu Town house at Gurugram. The accused told the police that they used to pay Rs 30,000 rent per month and the landlord did not know about their “business”.

They mostly targeted Axis Bank customers after posing as bank employees as they had access in the OTP section of the bank. “The gang got access into the system of Axis Bank after finding a loophole in the bank’s OTP system. Then, they would withdraw money easily after cloning customers’ cards. They were operating a fake call centre in Uttam Nagar, Delhi, in the past and started this card cloning fraud in January. We got information about the gang and busted it,” said Chander Mohan, DCP (East).