12 Current A/C Holders Of Private Bank Lose Crores In OTP, User ID Scam

Indore (Madhya Pradesh): Vijay Nagar police have busted a current account OTP and user ID scam worth crores of rupees involving two relationship managers of a large private sector bank in the area.

Six accused including the three relationship managers and two youths from Telangana have been arrested for stealing the user ids and OTPs misusing the bank’s software and changing the mobile numbers in the records, police said on Wednesday.

The accused used to register the fake SIM cards bought from Hyderabad and they also destroyed the SIM cards in Hyderabad itself in order to mislead the police.  

Account holders lose money without getting OTP

DCP (zone-2) Abhinay Vishwakarma informed media persons that the police received some complaints from people that they lost money from their current bank accounts without receiving any OTPs in December last.

After receiving complaints from about a dozen people, the Vijay Nagar police started an investigation and found that some employees of the bank had changed passwords by fetching the user IDs through the bank software and fraudulently withdrew the money from those accounts.

During the investigation it was also found that the bank’s rlationship manager Kamal Kumawat was watching the account activities in the software and was in contact with some person through WhatsApp and Telegram calls. He had changed the passwords of the accounts of some people.

In technical investigation, the police came to know that numbers of Indore and Telangana were used in the crime. Some police teams were constituted and were sent to different places to arrest the culprits. The DCP further said that a letter has been written to the bank to know their arrangements to secure accounts of the customers.

Modus operandi  

—–Kamal Kumawat is the relationship manager of the bank in the Vijay Nagar area of the city. He used the software to redress customer complainants and in the process found the OTPs of the customers. During the process, he found lakhs of rupees parked in a person’s current account. He first changed the password and the mobile number of the account to receive the OTP and later withdrew money from the account.

——His brother-in-law Stanley Jacob, who is from Manasa in Mandsaur and worked as a relationship manager with the same bank there, was also involved in the crime.

——–Abhishek Malviya, who works in the bank in the city,

—-Lavdeep Singh of the city,

-Krishna Kumar and Sai Kiran, both residents of Telangana were also arrested in connection with the same

-The accused used to send a youth to Telangana by flight to destroy the SIM cards used in the crime to mislead the police that the crime was committed from there.

Sai Kiran had allegedly sold the SIM cards to the accused. Police claimed that the accused had stolen crores of rupees from the current account of the people from Punjab, Gujarat and Telangana as well. They used to buy gift vouchers of e-commerce sites and bought mobile phones including iPhones and other electronic gadgets worth lakhs of rupees. They had also bought gold from a website online. So far, goods worth Rs 19.74 lakh have been recovered from the possession of the accused. Police said that  as some of the duped people had lodged complaints with cyber helplines  so the  police  so far have a trace of Rs 52 lakh withdrawn by the accused.