There’s no dearth of smart brains in our country. Unfortunately, these sharp-witted youths often put their brains into the wrong alleys to amass money and commit crimes. Such is the case of a group of five engineering students who managed to rob a bank of 8.6 crores by using fake mobile wallet transactions over the last four months, by taking advantage of a flaw in the bank’s system, reported Times Of India.
Jewel Rana, the gang leader, is one among the five students and after the fiasco came to light, all of them have been arrested.
But how did they manage to do it?
Well, with novel technologies, come complications and a big flaw on the part of this private sector bank in Kolkata landed them in a fix.
The first step for the gang was to procure a lot of pre-activated SIM cards, which were offered to innocent villagers, who were then asked to open accounts and mobile wallet accounts within the bank.
Now comes the glaring defect. Consider this scenario: When a customer tried to pay from his own wallet to another wallet holder (receiver), and if the latter wasn’t logged into the internet, the sender didn’t lose any money. Instead, the bank ended up paying for him. As ridiculous as it sounds, all this while the bank did not know about the scam under their nose, until Rs 8.6 crore was drained off.
Another troubling fact is that the gang was supplied with thousands of pre-activated SIM cards (which violates TRAI regulations) in the border district of Murshidabad, a possible racket that requires a separate probe.
Well, taking account of this incident and many such recent fraud cases, it’s high time banks and the wallet wannabes give the utmost priority to security concerns to avoid such fiascoes in the future. Because crooks are lurking in every nook and corner to take advantage of such golden opportunities.