2, including juvenile, held for stealing money from ATM

Two people, including a juvenile, were nabbed while fraudulently extracting money from an ATM machine, thanks to timely action by bank officials.

This is the second incident this month when alert bank officials helped police catch the robbers.

The bank officials checked live feeds of the CCTV camera at the ATM kiosk and noticed the duo acting in a suspicious way. They rushed to the kiosk located in the same building, nabbed the culprits and handed them to the jurisdictional police.

During the interrogation, police learnt that the duo –identified as Mohammed Aarif (23) and a 12-year-old juvenile- are natives of Gurgaon in Haryana. Both were taken into custody to learn more about their gang.

At 12.50 pm on Monday, Narendra Kumar Jain watched the live footage from CCTV camera installed at the ATM kiosk in his building.

The manager in currency management branch at Mysore Bank Circle noticed two unidentified men enter the SBI ATM. While one was checking the ATM machine, the juvenile was watching others suspiciously. When the juvenile inserted the card to withdraw the money, his companion had turned off the power supply to the machine.

Jain had said in his complaint that he immediately alerted the staff of the currency custodians, who rushed to the kiosk and caught the criminals with the ATM card and Rs 10,000.

Preliminary investigations revealed that the duo was part of the same gang arrested on December 4 whose members are fanned out in several cities and use the same method to steal money.

While the gang would use a legitimate ATM card (and a bank account), they turn off the machine while withdrawing the money. The associate would hold on to the cash to ensure it does not slip back into the machine.

On December 4, Yeshwantpura police arrested 23-year-old Shahzad from New Delhi and 28-year-old Shahid from Haryana, after a sharp-eyed bank manager noticed the CCTV camera inside the ATM kiosk tilted away from the machine and alerted the police.

Jain told DH that a large group working in the city targets ATMs without security guards for the crime. Each day different individuals of the gang would visit the ATMs to commit the fraud. He said nearly 70 such fraudulent transactions happened in his branch recently.