The Uttar Pradesh special task force (STF) on Tuesday arrested a gang of four men that purchased personal data of bank account holders and later duped them on the pretext of providing them additional security features for credit cards. Police’s initial estimate says at least Rs1 crore was siphoned off from accounts.

The STF officers said the gang procured data of about 50,000 account holders of seven different banks.

The arrested men were identified as Sanjeet Kumar, Baldev Singh, Tapeshwar Chaudhary and Gajendra. The four men were arrested from the jurisdiction of Kavi Nagar police station in Ghaziabad.

The police said soon after their arrest, the STF verified details of 100 accounts and nearly 50% of them belonged to central paramilitary personnel. The gang had been operating for the past one year and procured data through one Shailendra Kumar, an executive with a firm that takes up data management for different banks.

The police said Kumar shared details of credit card holders with the gang for Re1 per customer. He is on run and teams are trying to trace him, police said.

“We estimate that details of about 50,000 customers of seven banks were shared with the gang and these mostly belonged to paramilitary personnel. The gang later roped in women tele-callers, who operated from locations in Delhi and Ghaziabad and would inform these customers that they were calling to upgrade security features of credit cards,” RK Mishra, deputy superintendent of police (STF), said.

“Once the customer parted with the one-time password (OTP), the gang got money transferred to their online wallets. The amount was later transferred to the bank accounts of people who charged a commission and paid the rest to the gang members,” he added.

Sources said that the gang earlier used a type of online wallet where the maximum transfer limit was Rs10,000. They later moved to another wallet where the limit is Rs 50,000. The gang was operating out of Ghaziabad and targeted a sub-inspector of the National Disaster Response Force on February 16. The gang got Rs 1.4 lakh and Rs 30,000 transferred from his accounts in two transactions. He got an FIR lodged at Kavi Nagar .

According to police sources, the telecallers would get customers to share their OTP after winning their trust by giving them personal details which the gang procured from the executive of the data management firm. “The tele callers would further tell customers that once the improved security features were put in place, they would be eligible to get a 50% claim from the bank in case they lost money to fraud. They also asked the customers to verify the OTP within a minute which gave them very less time to think about repercussions,” a police source said.

First Published: May 22, 2019 11:57 IST