Four men and a woman were arrested on Thursday night for allegedly duping a nationalised bank of Rs 1.88 crore.

In 2008, the bank’s BT Road branch had sanctioned personal loans of Rs 1.88 crore to 85 people, who had introduced themselves as employees of an NGO. The money was directly credited to the accounts opened in the name of the 85.

Officials of the bank became suspicious after noticing that only the five were withdrawing the loaned amount from the accounts using bearer checks and lodged a complaint.

Preliminary probe revealed that some bank officials had sanctioned the loans to fictitious people and the NGO was also a fake. Muktinath Chowdhury, Chandan Maitra, Debasish Maitra, Debasish Dey and Rinku Dutta were picked up from their homes in North 24-Parganas for their alleged involvement in the fraud.