Two held for hacking ATM, one on the run

LUCKNOW: Two people were arrested near Polytechnic crossing on Friday for hacking ATMs and stealing cash from them while a third is on the run. The two arrested are employees of an agency that loads the ATM with cash. The accused on the run is a maintenance engineer.

They were arrested by UP STF. According to SSP (STF) Abhishek Singh, Ashish Jaiswal and Ankur Srivastava worked as custodians of ‘ATMs’ and were responsible for maintaining cash in 18 ATMs of a government bank in Bahraich and on the Lucknow-Faizabad stretch. They had rigged six ATMs and stolen around Rs 5 crore.




STF has recovered Rs 25 lakh from them. Explaining the process of an ATM, Singh said that a report on all transactions is sent to the cash loading agency by the bank via email. The email is forwarded to the custodians, who then load the cash after taking it from the bank.

Meanwhile, the ATM itself is maintained by engineers from a different agency. The engineer has the unique password and username to gain entry inside the machine. “With the username and password, he can open the electronic journal (EJ) of the ATM and access all information about transactions,” added Singh. The arrested duo secured the username and password from the engineer, took out the money from the ATM and opened the EJ of the machine to tamper with it. In the report they gave to their agency, they mentioned names of fake customers and withdrew money. But when the bank cross-checked that list, it found that no such transactions had taken place. After the mismatch was recovered, the bank imposed a fine of Rs 35 lakh as liability on the company. However, the company conducted a probe and approached STF .