Shockingly, the three Romanian nationals identified as Aulin Budoai, Marian Grahma and Mew Ionel had come to India early in June on tourist visas and since the gang rented a two bed room flat at upmarket hill road in Bandra and started skimming debit cards. Police raided the house and recovered a cash of 28.5 lakhs, two laptops, 497 debit cards with magnetic code, a strip with mini spy cameras, skimmer machines, four I phones and one Samsung mobile. Police have also freezed their passports and have intimated the Romanian embassy.
The modus operandi of the gang was to do a reccee of ATMs, identify ATMs which are unattended by the security guards, make an entry into the ATM under pretext of withdrawing money while their associates kept a watch outside.
“They would stick the skimmers near the card reading slots and adjacent to it fit spy mini cameras near the key boards from where one keys in the passwords and than come in the late evening collect the machines that has already extracted the magnetic strips of various cards that has been swiped and the spy cameras which has recorded people keying the passwords. Using data recorded in the skimmers, the perpetrators then made new duplicate ATM cards with the help of card writers and use their passwords to withdraw cash from some other atms.” Said Deven Bharti, joint commissioner of police (law and order).
The racket came to light after a woman resident of Kurla approached the Vinobha Bhave Nagar police complaining that somebody had withdrawn 36, 500 from her account on four different occasions without her knowledge. “We asked her to get her bank statement and during the scrutiny we found the cash was withdrawn from her account from an ATM near Sheetal theatre in Kurla west. During the scrutining of the cctv footage we found him to have similarly withdrawn money from different atms from different banks and hence we concluded the accused is a common in many cases and we further studied it.” Said investigating officers Tanveer Shaikh and Ganesh Mohite.
Complainant woman told police that she had last withdrawn money from atm in Bandra. Police kept a watch on the particular atm and caught one of the accused no sooner did he entered the atm to withdraw cash using a clone card, police caught him. He was identified as Aulin who spill the beans on his two accomplices. Police than arrested his them. “During preliminary interrogations accused have said that they have similarly duped several people in Italy, Romania and other European countries. We will communicate with the Interpol to get more details of their international crimes.” Assistant commissioner of police Srirang Nadgowda.