Students exploited loophole in wallet service.
By Sreekanth A. Nair
Kolkata police have arrested a gang of five engineering students for cheating a private sector bank of more than a million dollars using a mobile wallet service. The fraud came to light only after $1,264,705 was siphoned off.
Understanding a loophole in the wallet service launched in December last year, the students used the service to cheat the bank. When a customer transferred money from his wallet to another person’s wallet and the receiver’s internet connection was not active at the time of the transaction, the money was going from the bank instead of the payer’s account.
Suspecting a fraud activity after finding out the money loss, the bank officials filed a complaint with the police and the investigation led to the engineering students.
Four other persons were also arrested along with the students. According to the police, Jewel Rana, a student, is the group leader.
“Jewel was known to Habibur Rehman, a dealer of a mobile service provider in Murshidabad. While Jewel was the brain of the gang with the college students arranging the wallet transactions, the unaccounted and unverified SIM cards were all arranged by Habibur’s men,” Joint CP (crime) Debashish Boral told The Times of India.
The police have found that the students were supplied with thousands of pre-activated SIM cards to carry out the fraud. More than 18000 wallets were created against 2000 accounts opened across Kolkata and Murshidabad. The SIM cards were procured by violating the norms of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI)
“We are investigating the case but it may take us some more time to dig into the details. It seems the accused used fake wallets to carry out a cheating operation of unprecedented magnitude. The arrests were carried out from Kolkata and Hariharpara in Murshidabad. The gang operated from Hariharpara,” said police.
In January, Chennai police had arrested three youngsters along with two bank officials for defrauding a bank of $735,294.