On 4th March, the Delhi Police Cyber Crime unit arrested the manager of Yes Bank’s Lajpat Nagar branch in New Delhi, identified as Mohammad Mukeem for selling fake bank accounts to cyber criminals.
Mukeem and two other employees of the bank were arrested for selling fake bank accounts to cyber criminals. As per reports, Mukeem and his associates were opening the new accounts using fake documents to conduct criminal activities in hiding.
Notably, a similar arrest was made involving an employee from Kotak Mahindra Bank raising concerns over the involvement of bank employees in criminal activities. The recently arrested Yes Bank employees provided bank accounts to a cybercrime syndicate operating from Haryana’s Mewat, a den of cyber fraud.
The arrested accused were getting paid handsomely for every fake account generated. The bank manager and his associates were getting Rs 15,000 to Rs 20,000 per account.
Other two employees of Yes Bank arrested in the matter have been identified as Anakesh and Roshan Kumar. Both of them are sales officers at the bank.
So far, transactions worth Rs 2 lakh have been unearthed out of which Rs 1.52 lakh were transferred directly to the fraudulently opened accounts. Cyber police are now investigating if there are other such fraudulent accounts have been opened.
ACP (cybercrime) Priyanshu Dewan said in a statement that the accused have opened at least 12 fake accounts. The police came to know about the racket after a 30-year-old MNC executive filed a complaint in April 2023 after being duped of Rs 9.2 lakh.
He was threatened by the criminals that there was a case against him and convinced him to pay a fat bribe to close the case. A case was filed in Cyber East police station under Sections 420 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 66D of the IT Act.
During the investigation, the police found that the money was transferred to the Chhatarpur branch of Yes Bank. When police traced the person whose documents were used to open the account, he told the police that he shared his details with Roshan Kumar, one of the accused arrested by Delhi police.
Roshan was picked by the police who directed them to his senior Ankesh, another accused in the case who then led them to Mukeem.
ACP Dewan said, “Mukeem was the branch manager at Chhatarpur then and was transferred to Lajpat Nagar recently. We arrested Roshan, Anikesh and Mukeem and took them on remand for questioning.”
He added, “Of the Rs 2 lakh they received from the gang, Mukeem kept Rs 1.2 lakh for himself and divided the remaining money between the other two. We are trying to arrest the man who asked them to open the accounts. We need to ascertain the extent of the fraud and find out if any other bank officials were involved in the racket.”
How cyber criminals defraud people using fake bank accounts?
Fraudulently opened bank accounts are used by cyber criminals when they try to lure a person by showing their bank account details or transaction details to appear authentic.
In some cases, they create fake websites and lure people to buy goods from these websites. The payment page of such fake websites could possibly be linked to the fake bank accounts. After a few days of operation, these websites are shut down abruptly without delivering any products to the customers.
Trigger messages or false alerts on WhatsApp or through SMS also lead to transactions from victim’s account to the fraudulent accounts of cyber criminals.
In such cases, the banking websites look strikingly similar to the original bank websites and when the victims enter their credentials, the cyber criminals get access to the victim’s bank accounts.
There have been cases where cyber criminals call a victim pretending to be an innocent person who mistakenly transferred money into the wrong account (i.e. the victim’s account) and ask the victim to send the money back.
The criminals even send a link to the victim to click on and “return” the money. Upon approving the payment, the victim ends up losing money to the frausters.
These fake bank accounts are also used by cybercriminals in fake loan apps. In these cases, the money that the borrower has to return is taken in these accounts.
Cybercriminals withdraw money from fake accounts almost immediately giving a very small window to the victim to complain and the police and bank to react to the complaint.
