Hired car GPS leads cops to 2 Romanians in Indore

KOLKATA: Two more Romanian nationals, Adriano Liviu and Cornel Conscacin, who were part of the ATM fraud gang that has siphoned off close to Rs 22 lakh from bank accounts of 82 customers in Kolkata, were arrested from Madhya Pradesh on Thursday, when the cops traced them to Indore with the help of the GPS installed in the vehicle they had hired.

After the country-wide raid started, Liviu and Conscacin, who were in Delhi initially, first escaped to Lucknow, where they put up at a starred hotel. On realizing that cops were after them, they on Wednesday checked out and booked a car through the hotel. Though they asked the driver to take them to the airport, both alighted mid-way. Within minutes, they contacted a travel agent and booked an LUV for Rs 60,000. With the help of the GPS installed in this vehicle, that the Kolkata police could track it to Indore from where the two were picked up.




Apart from the two, Vaico Aurel alias Nana, who was detained from Sunauli in Gorakhpur on the India-Nepal border while he was trying to flee the country, was arrested. With the three arrests, the police claimed to be close to exposing the entire modus operandi used by the fraudsters who installed skimmers at ATMs in Kolkata, copied users’ card details and siphon off money from their accounts. A lookout notice has been issued against a fourth Romanian accused, Cris, but he has managed to give the police a slip.

The police pointed out that they got major leads from interrogating the Delhi gang kingpin, Cornel Mirnea, who was currently lodged in Tihar jail. “We learnt that Aurel, Liviu and Conscacin fled Delhi after the Kolkata police started their raid. Aurel contacted his aide in Nepal, who runs a shop there, and reached the international borders, hoping to cross over. But he was detained by the Customs after the Kolkata Police issued a notice against him. We are in touch with the Nepal police to help us trace Aurel’s aide,” a source said. The police also got information on Aurel from two others arrested in Delhi earlier, Dumitru Calin and Oprea Ovidiu Simion, who led the officers to their hideout at Hauz Khas in south Delhi, from where they recovered Aurel’s passport. “We had no clue about Liviu. While checking CCTV images, we saw plenty of grabs showing him withdrawing money from ATMs. With information from Mirnea, we joined the dots and zeroed in on Liviu,” said the police. While Liviu was tasked with producing the plastic cards and feeding the stolen PINs into them, Aurel arranged for logistics and withdrawals.

Liviu had repeatedly been entering India through Nepal since October 2016 and is believed to be close to Mirnea. Aurel came to India in February and Conscacin in May.