ATM frauds are very common these days, but the technique used by this 30 year old is way too different. Yes, police arrested an ATM auditor of a cash management company, Dinesh Kumar Lal, from Rajouri Garden in Delhi for doing an ATM fraud worth Rs 21 lakhs. This incident happened in the ATM kiosk of Union Bank of India (Rajouri Garden branch).
Want to know his smart way of siphoning off the money? Well, instead of those normal hacking techniques, Dinesh manually blocked the cash shutter of the ATM. Usually, what happens is that when the shutter is blocked manually, while the money is being dispensed, an error message is generated. This is exactly what Dinesh did between June 2015 and January 2016, to siphon off the money.
He manually tampered the dispensing shutter of the ATM, generated the “Error” message, took the cash that came out and complained to the bank that the transaction wasn’t successful. Dinesh repeated this act not once or twice but multiple times and successfully got Rs 21 lakhs. According to police, Dinesh targeted that ATM because of no security guard there.
Detailed technique of manual shutter blocking.
Dinesh is an MBA graduate from Sikkim Manipal University and he learned the technique on YouTube. By watching videos, he got to know that if the sensor of the ATM is tricked, the cash will come out but the amount won’t get deducted from the account, due to the error message. As soon as the cash would come out, he would leave the lowermost note and the uppermost note of the bundle as it is and would take away all the notes from the middle. Dinesh wouldn’t pull out those 2 notes; he used to block the cash tray with those notes until the ATM machine displayed the message “Unsuccessful transaction”. What happens is that if you don’t pull out those notes in a stipulated time, the ATM pulls the cash back and shows an error, due to which cash isn’t deducted from the account. Moreover, it is registered as a failed transaction in the bank logs. This way, he performed around 200 transactions and garnered Rs 21 lakhs.
On Friday, police arrested Dinesh on the basis of complaint lodged by the branch manager, Rajnish Narang. A case has been filed against him under IPC section 420 and currently, he’s in police custody.
When the bank carried out an internal audit, huge losses were seen and after this, the CCTV footage of all the ATM transactions was investigated. The bank manager said,
“After scrutiny of CCTV footage of ATM transactions, the bank found that one of the customers had withdrawn money from the ATM, but lodged a complaint about non-disbursal of cash. Officials zeroed in on the accused — he was seen using different debit cards, and tampering with the cash dispensing shutter. Footage also showed him holding the cash.”
He kept using this technique thinking he won’t get caught; have you come across any such unique techniques? If yes, share with us in our comments section below.
