Techie exposes skimmer at Kasba ATM

KOLKATA: A day after attending a seminar on cyber security, a software engineer in his early 30s claimed to have found an ATM card skimmer, which looked identical to the card reader, at an unguarded private bank ATM in Kasba’s Bakultala on Sunday afternoon.

Soumyabrata Sen, a software engineer with Cognizant, was at the ATM booth located at the crossing of Bakultala Lane and Rasbehari Avenue around 3.30pm on Sunday to withdraw Rs 3000 from his father’s account with another bank. Sen was running the mandatory checks he had learnt only a day before at a seminar. “I checked the green plastic case on the card reader and felt something was wrong. The colour was a little off and it seemed larger than the usual one. On touching, I felt the reader was not fixed properly. So, I didn’t insert the debit card. Then I checked the panel above the keypad and as I pressed it on the edges, it came off and there was a skimming device with a memory chip and a small camera,” Sen told TOI.

Realising that he had exposed a skimming device attached to the ATM, he first went outside and alerted the man who had withdrawn money from the ATM immediately before him and then called one of his seniors, who told him to call the police. Officers of Kasba PS, barely 300 metres away, reached the spot and seized the panel with the camera and SD card. They also dislodged the card scanner attached to the top of the card reader. “We have seized the suspected parts and informed bank officials suspecting that the ATM has been compromised,” said an officer.

Manager of Global Force, the firm in charge of maintenance at the ATM, later sent a technician to check the device. He has switched it off till the investigation is over. “I do not come to this ATM for regular maintenance. I am here to take stock of the situation and inform my seniors. All I know is that this ATM didn’t have a guard,” said Mehndi Hasan Mullick, the technician.

After the news became public, many residents, who regularly use this ATM, visited the spot and started discussing if their card details were hacked. “I use this ATM regularly. Yesterday, I had withdrawn Rs 3000 and today morning I had withdrawn Rs 1000. Has my card also been hacked?”businessman Sanjib Naskar asked a policeman standing near the ATM.

The incident comes five days after residents in various parts of the city complained that they lost their money through illegal ATM transactions. Probing into the case cops arrested two Romanian nationals on Friday and recovered 20 fake debit cards from them.