Suspicious of three men who kept opening new accounts at a nationalized bank branch, staffers at the Thane branch tipped off the police, which led to the discovery of a fraud and the arrest of the trio.
Investigations revealed that the three would fraudulently acquire Aadhaar cards, morph their pictures on them and provide them to cyberfrauds for a 20% ‘transaction fee’.
The accused also managed to secure loans from banks using the fake documents. Upon receiving the tip-off, police raided a dormitory in Fort and arrested the three accused and recovered 95 Aadhaar cards, several PAN cards and pass books of various banks. The arrested accused were identified as Umesh Darshan, 32, a truck driver, Aman Kumar Dillip Prasad, 23, an auto driver and Rahul Kumar Sanjay Kumar Verma, 30, all residents of Bihar.
“We learnt that they used to get information about Aadhaar cards of a particular area and then use an to post their photo on the other person’s Aadhaar card. They used to then approach banks and open many accounts this way. This way, they would get debit cards fraudulently and supply it to various cyber frauds,” said a police officer from MRA Marg police station.
They have used this modus operandi to open bank accounts in every state in various banks, the officer said, adding that they used to approach banks in the same area as the address on the Aadhaar card.
“However, as they visited the bank too many times, the executives in a bank in Thane got suspicious and informed the local police who informed the MRA Marg police in whose jurisdiction they were staying,” said the police officer.
