Marian Gabriel Illie, the key accused was nabbed from a Hotel in Worli.
AB Wire
The Mumbai police on Wednesday arrested a Romanian Citizen in connection with the hi-tech ATM robbery in Kerala.
Marian Gabriel Illie, the key accused was nabbed from a Hotel in Worli has revealed that the theft was carried out using skimmer devices.
“We have been tracking him since Tuesday morning with the help of cyber experts. Finally, we tracked him down to a hotel an informed our Mumbai counterparts. Illie will be handed over to Kerala police after legal procedures. We are yet to fix the date when he will be brought to the state for evidence collection. We will arrest the other person after interrogating him,” G Sivakumar, Deputy Commissioner of Police, Thiruvananthapuram City, told media.
The incident came to light when some of the customers who were robbed of the money- ranging from 5,000 to 40,000- thronged the bank on Monday.
A team of top police officers, including ADGP B Sandhya, Range IG Manoj Abraham and cyber and technical experts visited the SBI ATM at Althara junction at Vellayambalam, Thiruvananthapuram where a suspected electronic device was found to have been installed.
The police recovered the skimmer device that was hidden in the smoke detector in the ceiling of the ATM unit. The chip in the card reader was missing and the money was withdrawn from various branches in Mumbai.
The police had identified the three suspects, all of them Romanians, after the cops spotted them in CCTV videos from ATM counters. The other accused, who were seen in CCTV footage fixing a device in the ATM counter were identified as Christian Victor (26) and Bogdean Florian (25).
Once the videos emerged online, the employees of hotel in Thiruvananthapuram-where the trio stayed for three days in the first week of July-have identified them and handed over copies of their passports to the cops.
They allegedly robbed 2.5 lakh in a day.
“Atleast 20 persons had lodged a complaint. We suspect there can be more victims,” said a senior police officer.
Most of the customers who received SMS alerts have lodged complaints and many banks were flooded with requests to block cards and change PIN numbers.
State Bank of India announced that it will give refund to those customers who lost their money.
This is the first such case reported in the state.