Journalist among 3 held for ATM heist

The three arrested are Anoop Srivastava,supervisor of Cash Management Services (CMS),cash custodian Awadhesh Pal and Naresh Kushwaha,the local TV channel reporter. Police also recovered Rs 24 lakh from the accused — Rs 11.5 lakh from Anoop,Rs 4 lakh from Awadhesh Pal and Rs 8.5 lakh from Naresh. The main accused,Bhupesh Kumar,who was one of the staff of the cash loading agency,is,however,absconding.

According to the police,the accused had been taking out money from the ATMs for the past four years. Earlier,the amount taken out used to be small and they would also “return” it to the ATMs. In the last 18 months,they had started taking out bigger sums and were failing to refill the same,leading to a shortfall of around Rs 1.67 crore. The money used to be spent on gambling,wine,women and even taking up a petty contract.

The incident came to light on July 11,when an ATM of the Axis Bank at Civil Lines ran out of money and the cash custodian,Bhupesh,went missing. On that day,Bhupesh had withdrawn Rs 30 lakh from eight ATMs of the bank,police said.

“Anoop was the mastermind. Naresh was friends with

Anoop and was actively involved in the entire racket. He thought that he would not get caught because he was a journalist,” said Superintendent of Police (City) Shailesh Kumar Yadav. Anoop had roped in Awadhesh and Bhupesh in the racket.

The Modus Operandi

The gang adopted two methods to take out the money. “For instance,if Rs 30 lakh were to be deposited in an ATM,the accused would deposit only Rs 10 lakh. But the amount in the ATM’s internal computer,being monitored from Mumbai,would be shown as Rs 30 lakh. Thus,nobody suspected anything amiss,” said Inspector In-charge (Civil Lines) Satyendra Tiwari.

Alternatively,the gang would take out money after loading the full amount in the cash chest. Both the cash custodians knew the 10-digit passwords of the cash chest of all 17 ATMs and the guards would not suspect anything because they were company employees,police said.

Anoop would handle the auditors visiting the ATMs for physical verification once in a month. “For instance,if the auditor wanted to verify an ATM in Lukerganj,Anoop would first delay his arrival at the spot and,in the meantime,get Bhupesh and Awadhesh to take out money from some other ATM and fill it up in the Lukerganj ATM,” said Tiwari.

On July 11,the accused ran out of luck when an auditor of CMS insisted on visiting all the ATMs on the same day. “Anoop had been avoiding physical verification for the past 15 days on one pretext or the other. On July 11,when the auditor threatened to take action against Anoop,he realised that he would be caught. So he called Bhupesh and asked him to withdraw as much amount as possible and disappear,” said Tiwari.

“The call details revealed that Anoop and Bhupesh spoke to each other 80 times within three hours on July 11,” said Yadav. Apart from spending money on gambling and women,Naresh and Anoop had even managed to get some railways contract in somebody else’ name at Malwan in Fatehpur with the help of the ill-gotten money. “Bhupesh too got his sister married after taking out Rs 6 lakh from the ATM last year,” said Yadav. Efforts are now on trace Bhupesh.