The gang after their arrest. (Bangalore News Photos)

Bangalore, June 7: A six-member gang that has been merrily robbing techies and businessmen by scaring them with fake remote-controlled belt bombs finally ran out of luck yesterday.

Police today said the six, aged between 25 and 40, had been arrested with the help of pictures snapped by closed-circuit cameras at ATMs where they had forced their three victims to withdraw cash.

Their modus operandi was simple: they would call the victims to an isolated spot or waylay them, pull them out of their cars, strap what they called was a “remote-controlled belt bomb” around their waists and threaten to detonate it if they did not pay up.

Terrified, the victims would take them to an ATM and shell out as much money as possible.

The final victim of the gang, headed by travel and tourism graduate D.K. Kiran, 26, and his engineer friend Maniram, 32, was a senior software consultant, Srinivas Rao.

Rao, 38, was on his way to his office on May 27 when the gang flagged down his car at Raja Rajeswari Nagar on the Bangalore-Mysore Road, about 14km from the city centre.

When Rao stepped out assuming they were in need of help, the gang bundled him into their vehicle and pulled off the belt-bomb trick. Then they asked him for Rs 80 lakh.

Rao handed over a cheque for Rs 30,000 and Rs 1.5 lakh in cash that he withdrew from an ATM nearby. When he said he had no more money, the crooks took his mobile number, told him to pay the balance in a day or risk being blown up. Then they let him go.

The software consultant lodged a complaint with the police the day after, having found out that the belt bomb was fake. The police assured him they were on the lookout for the gang as a similar complaint had been made earlier.

The police today revealed that two businessmen, dealing in fire-extinguishing equipment, had been robbed in the last two months. V.C. Gupta and Benjamin Selvanathan, both known to some of the gang members, had been called to an isolated parking lot on the pretext of striking a business deal and similarly threatened.

Gupta parted with Rs 2.5 lakh on March 25 and Selvanathan with Rs 75,000 on April 4.

City police commissioner N. Achyut Rao said Maniram and Kiran ran a bogus consultancy firm promising graduates IT jobs. When their fraud was found out and the pressure to return money piled, the duo, along with four others, hatched the belt-bomb trick.

“The gang could be involved in other job rackets. We have a lot of complaints. We are trying to verify them,” Gopal Hosur, joint commissioner (crime), said.