Staff Reporter :Members of Rapid Action Battalion [RAB] on Wednesday detained a Chinese national from an ATM booth in the city for his involvement in suspected ATM [Automated Teller Machine] fraud. The man, identified as Zou Jian Hui, 38, was caught red-handed from a Prime Bank ATM booth at Elephant Road under New Market Police Station. Commander of RAB-2 Lieutenant Col Mohiuddin said, “The booth’s security personnel informed bank authorities after Hui was taking unusually long time to complete transaction inside the booth. Later, the Prime Bank authorities informed the RAB.””The foreigner withdrew all together Tk 66,000 through some ATM cards. We nabbed him from the booth at about 11:30 am. We are yet to be sure whether the cards found in his possession were issued by overseas banks. He is being quizzed,” Mohiuddin also said. According to RAB, the Chinese national used three cards. Of them, he threw away one card. He took 11 attempts to withdraw money from the booth using two cards of two international banks.Officials said the cards are not of Prime Bank. One card is issued by an international bank based in the USA. The issuing authority [bank] of another card could not be known immediately. The detained foreigner, during interrogation, informed the RAB that he had taken several attempts earlier to withdraw money from the booth.Security guard of the ATM booth informed the police that the Chinese man had offered him bribe not to catch him. But the security guard did not listen to him. When contacted, Officer-in-Charge [Investigation] of New Market Police Station, Mahbubur Rahman, told The New nation last night, “The detained Chinese national is now under custody of RAB. No case was filed in this connection till yesterday evening. We’ll take steps as per law after RAB handovers the detainee.”Apart from it, the Prime Bank authority yesterday also discovered at least two more incidents of card fraudulence in its two separate ATM booths hours after RAB detained the Chinese man, officials said.Major Ataur Rahman, Company Commander of RAB-2, said, “As per the information, more than Tk 2 lakh was withdrawn from the booths located at Panthapath and Farmgate around 6:30am. The bank came to know about the stealing in the afternoon when they were closing the accounts for the day.”When asked, Rezaul Haque, Vice President of Prime Bank [Alternate Delivery Channel Division], said, ‘Officials found abnormal transactions while closing businesses [of Wednesday]. The CCTV footage of booths showed foreign nationals withdrawing cash.”.Bank officials suspected that a syndicated skimming had occurred simultaneously in the booths.It is not first ATM booth scam in the country. Rather, the fraudulent activities came under the spotlight when different kinds of ‘freak transactions’ using ATMs of several banks were reported in February and March , shocking the clients.A Polish citizen named Thomas Piotr and three City Bank card division officials were arrested on February 21 night and early February 22 for their alleged involvement in ATM card fraudulence.The incidents have reportedly cost several banks, including Eastern Bank Limited and City Bank, Premier Bank clients hundreds of millions of taka. Bangladesh Bank investigators have found that skimming devices were planted in six ATM booths of the banks to steal cash money.
