Two Nigerians wanted in connection with a banking fraud case reported in Tamil Nadu few months back have been arrested by the South District Police.
It was alleged that the arrested men were both part of an international online hacking network, the members of which send a Malware affected attachment after accessing email addresses of bank customers. According to the police, when a customer downloaded the virus affected attachments, it created a parallel folder of that customer with the hacker.
“Thereafter, whenever the customer used net banking, his information was stored in the hacker’s computer also and was used by the hackers to access the customer’s bank account. The hackers would also get the mobile number of the customer blocked so that no SMS alert could be received by him or her. So far they have targeted 500 account holders and the laptops seized from them contained data of more than 1.5 crore accounts from almost all the major banks across the country,” said a senior police officer.
One such victim, Subramanium Mohan, a resident of Coimbatore, approached the local police informing them that an amount of Rs.70 lakh was debited from his NRI account and transferred to three different accounts, one of them based in China. On the basis of Mr. Mohan’s complaint a case was registered at Coimbatore City Cyber Cell on August 9.
“During our investigations, we found that two banks accounts in India, where a part of the money debited from Mr. Mohan’s account was deposited, were held by M/s R.P Enterprises and Sujata Traders. On verification, beneficiaries of the cheated amount were found to be Rajesh Pandey of M/s R.P Enterprises, Badarpur, Delhi and Vivek of M/s Sujata Traders at Faridabad, Haryana. The know your customer (KYC) document submitted to the bank by account holders and addresses given by the account holders were verified and were found to be fake,” said the officer.
The police then perused the account statements which revealed that amount deposited in the said accounts was being withdrawn through ATMs.
“The manager of a bank in Faridabad informed us that he had been contacted presumably by an account holder, who spoke in English with a certain accent. With the help of the phone number used to call we zeroed in on Roland Chukwudi Alumona and Stanley Ransome Ogwu and arrested them from Raju Park here,” said the officer.
