THE ATM theft at some city points early this month by fraudsters revealed in the hindsight the bigger stake that the country’s ATM banking is bracing for; but what is gratifying is that it became public before it was too late. As per disclosure by senior police officials of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP); which national dailies reported on Thursday, both local bank officials and foreign nationals were at work and running crime gang to steal money breaking ATM booths from Dhaka streets. The network has nationals of countries including Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Italy. Some Bangladeshi nationals living in London were also involved, although all of them were not present in the country when they were fast developing the network to swindle cash mostly breaking the credit cards secrecy. We never thought that swindlers from Europe would travel to Bangladesh to break in ATM buy it happened defying all imagination. Meanwhile, they were also able to avoid the notice of the law enforcing agencies while keeping most bank managements unaware about it. It was mainly possible because some bank officials of the concerned transaction sections of the banks were also recruited and involved to keep the frauds under cover.It appears that the German national made his permanent residence here marrying a local woman who was equally engaged in the ATM scam. The gangsters would hack detail information of clients’ credit cards inserting a skimming device in ATM machine as they had knowledge that ATM booths in the capital have no anti-skimming devices to protect clients’ information. Then they would clone the credit cards and used their duplicates to break in the cash. They also used point of sale machine (PoS) for transfer of stolen money. For that the fraudsters used hotels, restaurants and travel agencies showing that they were building a total network of financial crimes to swindle cash from banks. What the police disclosure said is that fraudsters have slowly targeted Bangladesh as its banking system was making significant stride and rapidly offering ATM services in almost all city corners for round the clock service to clients. The use of credit cards has also multiplied in recent years with growing business activities locally and in external business. But what is quite surprising is that they were also able to recruit bank officials from within the concerned banks to make their way easy. The sudden break down of security for electronic banking shows that Bangladesh Banking system needs comprehensive security at all level including call for protection from global anti-graft agencies. We also believe banks’ oversight function over transactions must be increased along with police vigilance against such crimes.
