Crime Branch has arrested kingpin of an ATM skimming rackets operating in north India. The man, Parvesh Dagar, was arrested from Dwarka and a countrymade pistol and rewriteable cards were recovered from him. Dagar has duped at least 1,000-1,500 people of several crores in the past three years, police claimed.
Recently, only in a week, Dagar duped a few hundred people in south Delhi alone, which forced the cops to lock down ATMs that were operating without a security guard.
DCP (crime) Rajesh Deo said Dagar and his associates used to fix skimming machines in the card insertion slots and a camera on the keypad to record the finger movements of the targets entering their PIN.
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After collecting data from about 100-150 customers, the gang would remove the machines and download the information in a laptop. They then used a rewriteable ATM card to copy each data.
Dagar then used to send one of his associates to the ATMs around 11.59pm to make multiple transactions before and after midnight to encash on the maximum limit. The cash was then distributed among the gang members. Using the modus operandi, the gang managed to earn Rs 30-40 lakh per months, police said
After a spate of theft complaints in the past few weeks, a team led by ACP Jasbir Malik and inspector Riteish Kumar started tracking the movement of the gang on the basis of inputs from various ATMs across south Delhi. They were tipped off about Dagar¡¯s movement in Dwarka from where he was arrested. During a search, police recovered rewriteable cards from Dagar¡¯s possession.
Later, when the police team was chasing Dagar¡¯s other associates, they rammed the police gypsy with their car and fled.
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During interrogation, Dagar told the cops that the mastermind of the gang, Praveen, who was lodged in Uttaranchal jail, used to procure the skimming machines through a contact in Chandigarh.
The gang would recce unguarded ATMs in the area, while another team would go around fixing the skimmers in the kiosks. Later, a different group would be sent for withdrawls. The gang operated with a similar modus operandi in Rajasthan, UP, Uttarakhand, Haryana and Goa and kept shifting base.
While scanning through the laptops recovered from Dagar¡¯s car, the cops recovered data of more than 40,000 people, which have been sent for a forensic analysis to identify the ATMs and the banks from which they were collected. Police will send notices to these banks asking about the security measures they have in place to prevent such attacks.