The Delhi Police on Wednesday claimed to have arrested two criminals for allegedly spiriting away money by cloning ATM cards in National Capital.
Police said that the duo had looted over Rs 25 lakh from people in city by making 500 ATM clones in last three months.
The accused have been identified as Rajesh Sharma (52), a resident of Sector-25 in Delhi's Rohini and Shamsher alias Shera (22), a resident of Dwarka. Police said that the duo is also found involved in more than dozen cases of theft and cheating registered across Delhi.
According to Anto Alphonse, the Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Dwarka district, on November 18, specific inputs were received that a shrewd and cunning cheater, who had withdrawn money from ATM by using cloned Debit and Credit cards, would come at Dwarka Sector-20.
"Acting on the inputs a trap was laid and Rajesh was caught red handed while he was withdrawing money from an ATM using cloned card. On his personal search, 10 cloned debit and credit cards, four transaction slips, and one VeriFone Data Saving Machine was recovered. Further, on his instance Shamsher was also apprehended and 10 more Verifone Data Cloning Machines, 61 cloned Debit and Credit cards along with cloning devices were also recovered from their possession," said the DCP.
"During interrogation, the duo disclosed that in August 2019 they took a Spa Center in Dwarka Sector-10 on rent and stationed VeriFone cloning machine. Around 2-3 customers used to pay for services through their Debit/Credit cards daily.
The Duo, then swap the ATM cards of innocent people for payment and asked them to insert their PIN number.
As soon as the customer enters his PIN, the machine stored the data. The accused then used to say to customers that the machine is not working and asked them to pay in cash or get their card swapped on another machine," said the DCP.
"The data stored by the accused was then downloaded in the laptop and they further transferred it to blank cards of different bank by using MSR machine.
To remember which card has which bank's data, accused used to paste a chit of name of the bank and its PIN number. After waiting for 15-20 days, the accused used to withdraw money from cloned ATM cards without the knowledge of customers. Till date, the accused have used 500 cloned cards and withdraw over Rs 25 lakhs rupees in total," the DCP added.