A taxi driver with a good memory helped the Mumbai Police Crime Branch trace Gabriel Marian — one of the Romanians suspected to be behind the hi-tech ATM robbery in Kerala — to Navi Mumbai. Crime Branch officials said as soon as the Kerala police informed them that the accused was staying in a Colaba hotel, a team from Unit I was sent there on Tuesday evening.
“He had checked out of the hotel on Tuesday morning. Our team conducted inquiries in the area and found a taxi driver who remembered dropping a foreign national matching the description of the accused at Vashi in Navi Mumbai,” said Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sanjay Saxena, Mumbai Police.
The police team then visited hotels around the spot where the cabbie had dropped the accused, and one of the hotels confirmed that the accused had checked in on Tuesday. The accused was picked up and the Kerala police were informed on Wednesday morning. The Kerala police obtained transit remand of the accused from a Navi Mumbai court and left with him on Wednesday afternoon.
In Kerala, meanwhile, the ripples caused by the ingenious ATM skimming fraud are yet to abate. On Wednesday, a new set of ATM cardholders reported unauthorised withdrawal of cash from their accounts. The development has alarmed bankers. It has triggered concern among police that the scale of stolen customer information could be much higher than what was initially suspected.
Investigators said most of the illegal withdrawals, fitting a pattern, were made from ATMs in Mumbai. They were probing whether the bank’s servers had been compromised.
‘One of 4 suspects’
Gabriel Marian was one of the four Romanians — all from Crajov — who supposedly engineered the sophisticated e-commerce age electronic swindle. The police believe that at least three of the suspects left for Romania early August. An official said the accused had improved on the basic technique of fixing illegal card readers in ATM slots by tapping into the Local Area Network cables that link teller machines with their bank’s central server.
