Awareness and the need to maintain secrecy of password for lockers, debit and credit cards is stressed to the public by banks and financial institutions. But, there are instances when employees of these and the institutions also forget to do so, leading to thefts.
In a burglary at the house of a senior bank employee in the outskirts of the city recently, the burglar could withdraw more money using the debit card as the pin number was written in the pouch in which the card was kept.
In another incident, burglars who managed to gain entry into a house found it easy to use an ATM card and withdraw money as the card holder had kept the new card safe in the cover in which the bank had sent it, with the password. By the time owner of the card realised the card was stolen, the burglars had already withdrawn several thousand rupees.
Earlier this week gold jewellery and cash worth more than Rs. two crore was taken away from a financial firm by a manager who had quit just that day and a woman employee who was on the verge of quitting. They had used duplicate keys, taken away the CCTV camera recordings and also decoded the sensor.
However, technology made detection easy in this case, as the police grew suspicious of the hand of an insider in the incident as no one else will be able to decode the sensor easily. Though it will not be possible to change the locks from the gate to the safety locker every time an employee quits or is transferred, financial institutions can have a system so that employees do not tamper with the security codes.
(Reporting by M.K. Ananth)
