A branch manager of a nationalised bank has been arrested by the Bengal CID for allegedly creating mule accounts used to siphon funds of people duped into an investment racket.
Police identified the accused as Sourav Mandal, who was in charge of the Kankuria branch of Canara Bank in Murshidabad.
The fraud was reported a few weeks ago when a resident of Chandernagore in Hooghly complained that he was duped out of several lakhs of rupees which he had invested in cryptocurrency seeing an advertisement on social media.
“The complainant was promised high returns on relatively small investments. He initially made small investments and received the returns as promised. But as he started investing large amounts, the returns became irregular and gradually stopped. Realising the fraud, he reported the matter to police,” said an officer in the cybercrime wing of the state CID.
The police found during the investigation that the money the Chandernagore resident had invested was transferred to multiple e-wallets registered in the names of various private limited companies and linked to accounts in banks lin Haryana, Delhi and Punjab.
“Crores of rupees were transacted through these bank accounts. While doing a deep analysis of the accounts, we found that in the second layer of transfers, several accounts in Birbhum, Murshidabad, South 24-Parganas and North 24-Parganas were involved. Of these, at least six bank accounts in a branch in Birbhum were in the name of Sourav Mandal,” said a senior CID officer.
Mandal turned out to be the branch manager of a nationalised bank in Murshidabad’s Kankuria. More people are involved in the racket, the police said.
“Sourav Mandal has been arrested for his involvement in cybercrime. He is in police custody till February 20,” said the inspector-general of police (II), Shankha Shubhra Chakrabarty.
Mandal has been booked under sections of cheating, criminal breach of trust and the Information Technology Act.
Canara Bank told Metro via a WhatsApp text: “We are fully cooperating with the investigative agencies… and are committed to a thorough and transparent process…. We would like to emphasise that Canara Bank takes matters of customer data security and regulatory compliance extremely seriously. We have robust systems and procedures in place to protect our customers’ information and are committed to upholding the highest standards of banking practice.”
Many of the bank accounts through which the complainant’s money was siphoned off had been attached to phone numbers that were operated at least once through a phone registered in Mandal’s name, the police said.
“Mandal was a direct beneficiary of the money siphoned off from the complainant’s account and was transferred through mule accounts (opened fraudulently),” a senior officer said.
“He could avert the police glare by using others’ KYC (Know Your Customer) details. He used the same documents to obtain mobile numbers to which these accounts were linked. He controlled the accounts through those numbers. But he made a mistake by using his phone to operate some of the SIM cards.”