City Police Commissioner A.K. Viswanathan on Tuesday appreciated the efforts of a special team, led by the Additional Commissioner of Police, Central Crime Branch, C. Easwaramurthy, which successfully busted an inter-State gang siphoning off money from ATMs using skimmer devices.
Last July, a maintenance engineer noticed a skimmer at an ATM of a nationalised bank in Ayanavaram. The Anti-Bank Fraud Wing began a probe following the alert, and arrested A. Irfan, 34, of Kolathur, and associates B. Allah Baksh, 30, of Seven Wells, and N. Abdul Hathi, 44, of Mangadu. Using the skimmer, they collected details like secret numbers and cloned cards.
The police seized a number of counterfeit cards, skimmer devices, encoders and decoders, laptops, mobile phones and an Audi car, worth a whopping ₹70 lakh, from the mastermind. Special teams of police arrested 10 suspects in total.