Man dupes SBI travel card platform for Rs 93 mn, CBI files FIR after a year

Accused is named as Sandeep Poojary, an employee of Yalamanchili Software Export, which provides manpower resources for handling operations of the travel card of SBI

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday registered a case against a person for fraudulently manipulating the database of State Bank of India’s foreign travel card resulting in a loss of Rs 93 million for the bank. SBI Travel card is a prepaid travel card which can be used at stores while travelling abroad. The FIR has been filed based on a complaint by SBI on 28th February, 2017 to the economic offence wing of the agency.
 

In the first information report, the agency named a person called Sandeep Poojary- an employee of Yalamanchili Software Exports (YSE), which provides manpower resources for handling operations of the travel card of SBI, for a fraud that happened during the period of November 2016 to February 2017.

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According to the complaint filed by Sagar Mazumdar, Deputy General Manager of SBI, Poojary had been issued three travel cards to his name between November and December, 2016 from SBI’s NRI Seawoods branch, Navi Mumbai. But he did not recharge the card. By virtue of being an employee of YSE, Poojary had access to the card’s database using which he altered the balance in the prepaid card system to conduct transactions from the three cards. Poojary did 374 transactions amounting to Rs 93 million over. a period of three months- from 8th November, 2016 to 12th February, 2017.  The transactions have mainly happened over e-commerce websites of four merchants and involve primarily four merchant sites-  Neteller.com, Entropay .com, Swiftvoucher and SKR*Skrill.com. All the merchant transactions came via VISA with the merchant country code as Great Britain with the transaction and billing currency in USD.
 

While the transactions happened through prepaid card system, Poojary used to alter the balance manually through Oracle database system of which he had access to by virtue of being an on-site employee of YSE. “Post authorisation, the settlement, transaction and authorisation have been deleted from the prepaid card system including the General ledger entry and so the balance sheet generated on the prepaid card system did not get any difference,” the FIR said.
 

After it raised suspicion, YSE conducted a review of operations following which the incident came to light. YSE then reported the incident to SBI which blocked the three cards and the four merchant sites for all prepaid cards.
 

Over the last 15 days, the CBI has filed more than seven cases on complaints filed by banks including Punjab National Bank, State Bank of India, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Bank of Maharashtra and Telangana Grameena Bank. Most of them relate to conspiracy and cheating, and some involve employees of the bank.