What do you do if you have not used your ATM card to withdraw money only to discover that someone else has siphoned off a couple of lakhs?
This was what Meena Vincent, a schoolteacher, discovered to her shock, and she has been running from pillar to post since then.
Ms. Vincent has her State Bank of Mysore ATM-cum-debit card with her, but someone managed to withdraw Rs. 2.53 lakh from her savings bank account using the ATM card of another bank at R.T. Nagar here.
Though the theft took place in May this year, Ms. Vincent has no clue about the culprit despite lodging separate complaints with the city police and the banks concerned, and meeting senior police and bank officers.
It was not mere loss of money for this 45-year-old woman. She had emotional attachment to the amount deposited in the bank as it was part of the terminal benefit she received from the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) five years after the death of her husband, who was a depot manager. Moreover, Ms. Vincent had saved the amount for her daughter’s admission to the MBA course at Mount Carmel College. Her daughter did not join the course as she could not pay the fee.
According to her complaint to the R.T. Nagar police and the bank, Ms. Vincent had Rs 3.28 lakh in the savings bank account of the State Bank of Mysore (SBM), R.T. Nagar. She noticed that the balance in her account had reduced to Rs. 1.53 lakh on May 16 when she withdrew Rs. 5,000 through an ATM. Ms. Vincent says she had not withdrawn cash through the ATM since April 27.
A bigger shock awaited her when she went to the bank to check the balance on May 18: this time there was only Rs. 71,758 left. This situation forced her to withdraw the remaining amount in her account. The passbook entries reveal that Rs. 2.53 lakh was withdrawn in the early hours between May 5 and 18 at an ATM belonging to the Corporation Bank in Ganganagar in amounts ranging from Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 18,000. On some days, a maximum withdrawal of Rs. 40,000 was made with multiple transactions continuously.
Though the SBM and Corporation Bank officials provided her some details, Ms. Vincent expressed displeasure over their “indifference and apathy”. Following the lukewarm response on the part of the banks to her complaints, she lodged a complaint with the Banking Ombudsman, Reserve Bank of India, Bangalore on August 27, where she said she suspected her case to be that of a cyber crime.
“How can anyone withdraw money from my account when the ATM card and pin number were in my possession?” she asks, adding that this was a clear pointer to loopholes in network banking.
Meanwhile, she also pointed out to the Banking Ombudsman that Corporation Bank’s ATM had a security guard and fitted with CCTV, but the bank refused to display the recorded video footage saying that “footages were blurred and not visible.”
