Kerala police yesterday took custody of a Romanian suspect arrested by the Mumbai police in the case of ATM skimming here.
Gabriel Marian Ilie, 27, was picked up from a hotel soon after he made yet another attempt to withdraw cash from an ATM on Tuesday using a cloned card of a Mumbai-based customer.
Arun M, a university teacher, got an SMS from the bank after the skimmer withdrew Rs100 of the Rs144 available in his State Bank of India in Vashi in Navi Mumbai.
He immediately reported it to the police here and they alerted their counterparts in the western Indian state capital.
The Belapur court in Navi Mumbai had left him to Kerala police custody for five days on Wednesday.
They brought him to the Kerala state capital yesterday afternoon.
Several fake ATM cards, spy cameras, skimmers and Rs95,000 in cash were also recovered from Ilie, who told the police that his three accomplices had already left the country.
He reportedly told the interrogators that he only provided “technical support” like installing the camera and chips while other gangsters looted money from ATMs.
His visa expires on September 9.
Among the two other identified members of the gang, visa of Cristian Victor Constantin, 26, expired on July 19 and Bogdean Florian Floreci, 25, was having a valid visa till December 16.
Police identified the fourth fraudster as Florin Ion whose details were not immediately available.
Inspector General Manoj Abraham, who heads the special investigation team, said they had sought the Interpol help track others believed to have left the country.
The cyber cell of Kerala police tracked Ilie to Navi Mumbai from his telephone calls and sought the local police help.
A similar card-skimming fraud was reported in Mumbai in 2013 involving Bulgarians and the Romanians were said to have learnt the technique from the Bulgarians.
They withdrew nearly half a million rupees from the accounts of more than 20 who used the ATM kiosk of India’s largest bank State Bank of India at busy Althara Junction, Vellayambalam, in the state capital.
Police identified Marian, Florian, and Victor from the CCTV footage from the ATM kiosk while planting skimmers and camera to capture the PINs and while checking into a hotel in the famed seaside resort of Kovalam.
The footage indicates that the three entered and fixed the skimmer and camera at 6.30 am on June 30.
The electronic device took a picture when the customer keyed in his secret PIN number, while the instrument placed in the card reader got the information of that particular card.
Skimmers usually obtain data from the card reader placed over the ATM’s real card slot and when one slides their card into the machine the counterfeit reader scans and stores all the information on the magnetic strip.
They also hid a spy camera, in this case behind the smoke alarm, to capture the personal identification number on the card and gain full access to the bank account.
A skimming scheme was introduced in a 2009 Malayalam movie starring Prithviraj, Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves, but such a fraud is being reported in the state for the first time now.