After offering help to woman at ATM, man replaces card, empties her account in Mumbai

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The accused replaced the woman’s debit card with another, and then withdrew Rs 2.75 lakh from her account.

According to the Byculla police, the incident took place in the first week of September when the complainant, Shakuntala, who hails from Nagpur, was in the city for work.

She was struggling to withdraw money at a Bank of India ATM in Byculla, when a man standing in the queue behind offered to help her, an officer said.

The woman handed over her card to the accused, told him her PIN, and asked him to withdraw Rs 1,500.

When the man inserted the debit card in the machine, he managed to check that her account balance was Rs 2.75 lakh.

He then gave her Rs1,500, and while she was counting the money, replaced her card with another Bank of India card, the police said.

“The woman did not realise that he was not returning her own debit card. He must have memorised her PIN, because he then cleaned up her account by withdrawing Rs 2.75 lakh from it,” said Inspector Bhaskar Rane who is probing the case.

There was no balance in the account linked to the debit card that the accused had given to the woman.

It was only two weeks later that the 52-year-old realised what had happened, and approached the Byculla police station. The police registered an FIR against unidentified accused on September 25.

“We called the person in whose name the debit card that the accused had given the woman was registered. However, it appears that his card had been stolen by the same accused. We suspect the accused withdrew all the money from this account and then exchanged the card with his next victim’s,” an officer said. “We suspect the person uses the same modus operandi to dupe people around ATMs,” he added.