Shamli police arrested Chetan Kumar on 21Sep. evening, they thought they had finally cracked the sensational ATM theft case reported in March this year.
The accused, in his early thirties, told police that the entire heist, which involved getting into an ATM booth with his face covered, opening the cash dispensing machine and taking away over Rs 18 lakh without being noticed, had been masterminded by the bank manager.
“The sequence of events narrated by the accused was startling. After thoroughly examining the CCTV footage from the ATM booth, we finally arrested Chetan. The accused bank manager is currently untraceable. We have added his name to the FIR and will soon arrest him. Officers said that Chetan had approached Robin Bansal, the manager of a public sector bank’s Bantikheda branch in Shamli, in February this year. “He has told us that he wanted a personal loan of Rs 1 lakh. During their conversation, Bansal offered to ‘reward’ Chetan Rs 50,000 if he agreed to steal money from the ATM at the bank’s Dheemanpur Road branch,” said an officer.
Chetan has revealed that Bansal not only hatched the entire plan but also provided him passwords and “trained him” in opening the cash dispensing machine without raising an alarm.
“A person has to beat a three-tier security system before laying his hands on the cash cassette inside the dispenser. After you open the machine’s main analog lock with a key, the cash vault is protected by two passwords. After entering the correct passwords, you get to the cash cassettes, which contain currency in different denominations. However, even the cassettes have to be unlocked. To carry out a theft without raising an alarm is possible only if you have help from an insider,” said a senior bank official, on condition of anonymity.
On the afternoon of March 4, Chetan got inside the ATM booth wearing a helmet. After introducing himself as a technician who had been called to repair the cash dispensing machine, he got inside the booth and stole Rs 18.3 lakh in cash. After a few customers complained to the bank staff about no cash in the machine, the latter slipped into action as the dispenser had been loaded with Rs 28 lakh just a day earlier. A police complaint was lodged by Nitesh Kumar, manager of Dheemanpur Road branch.
“Bansal was earlier posted at the Dheemanpur Road branch. Maybe that is how he knew the passwords. Initially, an FIR was lodged in the matter under sections 420 (fraud) and 406 of the IPC. After getting to know about the manager’s involvement, police have added section 411 to the FIR.
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