Lalbazar: The two Romanians arrested for allegedly masterminding the ATM fraud in Calcutta could be part of the same gang as the others from that country accused of being involved in similar activities elsewhere in India, police said.
Ovidiu Simion and Dumitru Caling, who were detained in Delhi on Friday and later arrested on the charge of masterminding the fraud, were allegedly involved in fraudulent withdrawal of money with cloned ATM cards that they had created with data stolen through skimming devices.
Officers of the detective department have contacted the Hyderabad police about the two Romanians arrested there in May on the charge of duping 46 people of Rs 35 lakh by stealing details of their cards.
"The same modus operandi was followed in the cases in Calcutta and Hyderabad and the accused are from the same country," an officer of the detective department of the city police said.
"Simion and Caling and the two arrested by sleuths of the Cyberabad cyber crime wing - Vasile Gabriel Razvan and Buricea Alexandru Mihai - might have belonged to the same gang. Razvan and Mihai had cloned more than 550 debit cards to rob people in Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai."
The Hyderabad police are looking for two other Romanians - Ticu Bogdan Costinel and Puica Eugn Marian.
Simion and Caling were detained by a team from Calcutta police after they were spotted "moving suspiciously" near an ATM kiosk in Delhi. The kiosk was one of those in the national capital from where the police said money had been fraudulently withdrawn from the accounts of a number of Calcutta residents.
The police have seized from the duo 18 cards containing encrypted account data skimmed from ATMs in Calcutta, Delhi, Haryana, Kohima, Bhubaneswar, Rajasthan and Patna.
"Simon and Caling used to convert the Indian currency notes to Euros and send them to their associates in Romania through money transfer outlets," an officers.
The police have so far found at least three "compromised" ATMs - one each of Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank. "Skimming devices were fixed in these machines to steal card data," the officer said.
