SHILLONG: With the surge in ATM fraud cases in the State, the city police have achieved a major breakthrough when it managed to arrest one person, who might turn out to be an important link in the racket that has duped hundreds of people in the country including Shillong.
One Md Mukhtar Ansari was arrested by the Meghalaya police team led by Inspector BK Mishra from a village in Dhanbad district of Jharkhand.
Informing this at a press conference here on Friday, East Khasi Hills district police chief M Kharkrang said that preliminary investigation revealed that the latest modus operandi adopted by the frauds is that the criminals usually call up gullible customers and identify themselves as a bank manager.
The criminals pretend that there is a problem with the ATM card of the customers and asked for the ATM and pin numbers on the pretext of changing the ATM card and pin number and as soon as the ATM card and pin numbers are given, the customer gets a call alert on his mobile that an amount has been debited from his account.
Speaking on the modus operandi of the arrested person, Kharkrang said that after the geeting ATM number they (the racket) would download e- wallet such as “Y Paycash”,”Mobikwik”, and “Paytm” in their smart phone and once downloaded, they would transfer the amount from the customer to their SIM card through these e-wallets and them is used for recharge, DTH and online shopping.
According to the senior police official, in its endeavour to get criminals, police team from district have been going to various states in the North East and also in the mainland where they have been able to arrest some of the accused persons.
Kharkrang said that they usually try hundreds of phone numbers every day to dupe people and out of many numbers, usually few people fall in their trap.
However, what is surprising is the fact that most of such fake calls are made from Dhanbad and Jamtara district of Jharkhand and surprisingly, there is no case against the miscreants in Jharkhand.
The miscreants usually debit Rs 4000 at one go and later the amount is spent on online shopping, recharging and others.
The police meanwhile has once again urged people not to disclose their ATM details to any one.
Kharkhrang said though it is still a challenge to tackle the menace of cyber crime but the only solution is for public to be aware that ‘self protection’ is the need of the hour adding efforts are made to train police officials on how to deal with such crime.
Meanwhile, the accused has been booked under the Information Technology Act. He was sent to five-day police custody.
