Noida: 3 held for cloning bank cards of customers at petrol pump

The Gautam Budh Nagar police arrested three people on Sunday for allegedly cloning bank cards of customers at a petrol pump in Greater Noida and siphoning money from their accounts, said police on Monday

The Gautam Budh Nagar police arrested three people on Sunday for allegedly cloning bank cards of customers at a petrol pump in Greater Noida and siphoning money from their accounts, said police on Monday. Three other people part of the gang are still on the run.

The three suspects in police custody on Monday. (Sourced)

The arrested suspects have been identified as Tarun Kumar, a resident of Hapur’ Vikas Singh, a resident of Bulandshahr and Pankaj (identified by first name), a resident of Delhi. Police said Tarun has been working as an operator at the petrol pump near Eldeco roundabout in Greater Noida for the last one-and-a-half years.

“Whenever a customer gave his bank card to Tarun to pay for petrol, he would swipe the card in a cloning machine, which would copy the customer’s data, and then in a point-of-sale machine. When the customer fed the card PIN into the point-of-sale machine, Tarun memorised the PIN and sent the customer’s bank data to his associates-- Manish, Rajesh and Shivam--through text message,” said Vishal Pandey, additional deputy commissioner of police (Dadri), Gautam Budh Nagar.

Pandey added the mastermind of the gang is Rajesh. “Upon interrogation, the suspects revealed that after sharing the data, they would meet Rajesh, who made the cloned bank cards. They would then withdraw money from the customer’s accounts using the cloned bank cards in other cities such as Mumbai and Kolkata,” said Pandey.

Police said the cheating came to light last week when a customer noticed that Tarun is swiping his card in some machine apart from the point-of-sale machine and registered a complaint at Beta 2 police station.

Pandey said police teams are on the lookout for the other three suspects and a notice has been sent to the owner of the petrol pump for his negligence.

“We are yet to ascertain how many people have been duped so far as the we are still scanning the bank account of the suspects. So far, we have retrieved details of a bank account they created recently, into which ₹13.5 lakh have been deposited in the last month alone. We are also finding other bank accounts... the total amount siphoned off from people’s bank accounts could be much higher,” said Pandey.

Police have recovered the card cloning machine and three mobile phones from the suspects. The three suspects were booked under Section 420 (cheating) of the IPC and produced before a magistrate on Monday, who remanded them to judicial custody.