Man arrested for ATM fraud escapes from police station

CHENNAI: A man arrested in the City by the Kolkata police on Sunday, managed to escape from the Triplicane police station, which is located in one of the highly guarded areas of Chennai. Police sources said Baskar Kumar was one of the three men arrested by the Kolkata police in connection with a fake ATM cards racket in West Bengal. After being produced before a magistrate court for obtaining a transit warrant, all three were kept in custody at the Triplicane police station and the Kolkata police team had planned to take them back to Kolkata by train.

Sources said Baskar Kumar had told police at around 4.40 pm, that he wanted to use the toilet after which one policeman accompanied him to one in the police station’s premises. It is said that the accused then pushed the policeman down and managed to escape after jumping from the compound wall of the premises.

A senior police officer in Chennai city police confirmed that Baskar had escaped and said that a special team has been formed to trace him.The other two accused arrested in the ATM fraud case are M Vijay Kumar Mandal, 22 and R Juhendaer Kumar Mandal, 23. All three accused are said to hail from Jharkhand and were wanted by the Kolata police for over a year now.

Based on a tip-off, the Kolkata police tracked the trio to a hotel at Chepauk Road at Triplicane. They were arrested with the help of the Triplicane police.A police officer privy to the case said the trio were allegedly part of an ATM fraud gang that had fixed skimmer machines in about 50,000 ATMs in Kolkata and stole the credentials of over 10,000 people. Using that information, they had created duplicate cards and were swindling money from bank accounts.

The Bidhannagar cyber crime police, after an alert, started to crack down. “As a part of the investigation, they combed through the ATMs across the city and recovered more than 10,000 skimmer machines. Only after the police arrested a few men of the gang, they came to know about the racket that involved crores of money,” said the police officer, quoting the Bidhannagar police.