Beware! Your bank id, password not safe

Cyberabad: The cybercrime branch of Cyberabad police arrested a gang of 7 members who would prepare polymer fingerprints (rubber finger prints) and withdraw amounts from innocent bank account holders.

According to the information, the complaint in the year 2019 took franchise from Roinet Solutions Pvt Ltd and white labeled his franchise as "Epoint India".

His job was to appoint the business correspondent agents by taking the documents Aadhar Card, PAN card, bank passbook copies. The agents would provide mini bank services to the needy customers of all banks with AEPS (Aadhar enabled payment system) method.

The complainant's company provided the user ID and passwords to the agents to provide the services of bill payments, money withdrawal and transfer through their "Epoint India" app.

The Accused on 04-05-2022 contacted the complainant and asked for AEPS license to give service to the customers.

The complainant verified his KYC documents and gave him a user ID and password. Later, the accused started transactions on May 5. After a few days, the complainant got notification from Roinet Solutions stating that this particular agent ( the accused) had fraudulently withdrawn amounts from (149) bank customers without their knowledge by cloning their finger prints. A total of Rs. 14,64,679 was transferred to 9 different bank accounts.

It is also learnt that the fraudsters had vast experience in the banking, lands and registration fields. By using vulnerabilities in IGRS portal of Andhra Pradesh, they downloaded land registration documents. They also collected names, Aadhaar numbers and fingerprints. By using those finger prints, fraudster prepared polymer finger prints (rubber fingerprints) of them using a chemical of heat. Post preparing the finger prints, fraudsters register with Digital Banking applications (AEPS Applications) which is also called as mini-ATM's. Easy Pay application were used for finding out the linked bank accounts and balance in those bank accounts. E-Point India application were used for withdrawing the amounts using the prepared polymer finger prints.

The accused were identified as Nallagalla Venkateshwarlu, Meghavath Shanker Naik, Ratham Srinivas, Darshanam Samelu, Challa Manikanta, Sheik Khasim Vali and Vishwanathula Anil Kumar.

The police seized a total of 2500 cloned finger prints, cash of Rs 3.4 lakh, 121 SIM cards, 20 mobiles, 1 PAN card, 4 biometric fingerprint scanner, 3 pendrives (with land documents downloaded), 4 kg color photopolymer orange liquid gel, 10 sheets of negative fingerprint copies and one car.