Police bust racket involved in cloning ATM cards, two held

With the arrest of two persons, the Delhi Police on Friday claimed to have busted a racket involved in cloning ATM cards in the national capital and other states, officials said.

The accused have been identified as Krishna Gopal (22), a resident of southwest Delhi's Kakrola area and Sumit Gola (30), a resident of east Delhi's Mandawali, they said.

Around three hundred cloned cards, one skimmer device, one country-made pistol and two live cartridges were recovered from their possession, police said.

"Police got a tip-off about the accused on Thursday, following which a trap was laid near Mahipalpur and the duo, who were coming from Chhatarpur road, were arrested after a brief chase," said Devender Arya, deputy commissioner of police (Southwest).

Interrogation revealed that the accused used to fit the skimming machine in the ATMs situated in Delhi-NCR and other states, including Maharastra, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, to collect the data for cloning, the DCP said.

After a few hours, they used to detach the skimmer machine from the ATM and extract the data in an encrypted form, Arya said.

Through social media, the accused remained in touch with some software engineers, who used to decrypt the collected data.

After collecting decrypted data, Gopal used to withdraw money from the ATMs. Gopal was found involved in two similar cases in Odisha and Ghaziabad, police added.