Gang member who withdrew cash using cloned cards of customers visiting Mohali brewery held
Gaurav Verma, a postgraduate in yoga, was a key member of the card cloning gang, six of whose members have already been arrested.
The cyber crime wing of Punjab Police have arrested the youth who used to withdraw cash from ATMs after stealing card details of customers visiting BrewMaster, Phase 5, Mohali.
Police said the accused, Gaurav Verma, a postgraduate in yoga, was a key member of the card cloning gang, six of whose members have already been arrested. He was arrested from Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh (MP) on Saturday.
Verma was on Sunday produced before a court that remanded him to two-day police custody.
Police said the gang’s kingpin Sumit Kumar, who was arrested from Lucknow on August 14, led them to Verma, who is currently enrolled in a university in MP’s Ujjain.
A cyber crime wing team led by inspector Samarpal Singh arrested Verma from his house in Lalpura area of Shajapur.
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Phase 11 station house officer (SHO) Gurpreet Singh Bains said, “We have now arrested seven members of the card cloning gang. Verma was the one who withdrew cash from ATMs. He was captured in CCTV cameras in not only Punjab, but also Chandigarh, Panchkula and Himachal Pradesh,” he said.
Police had earlier arrested other gang members — Saurab from Varanasi, Sumit from Lucknow, Mahesh from West Bengal, Karun Inderpal Singh from Agra, Rahul from Mumbai and Arun from Madhya Pradesh.
An MBA dropout, Sumit provided card skimming devices to Saurab, an employee of BrewMaster, who used them to clone debit cards of unwary customers. After cloning the cards using the stolen data, they would handover the duplicate cards to Verma to withdraw cash from various ATMs.
Sources said the gang members would find jobs as waiters at eateries, and then steal data and withdraw money from the accounts of the clients. They said the gang had duped more than 500 people of around ₹60 lakh. The matter first came to light in Mohali on August 3 after multiple fraudulent transactions were reported by people, many of them HDFC and ICICI bank account holders.
