MARGAO: Margao Town Police have accepted 10 complaints wherein people have complained that money from their accounts have been withdrawn through an ATM card used in Mumbai even though their accounts are in Margao and they have their ATM cards with them in Goa.
Deputy Superintendent of Police Serafin Dias admitted that there have been an increasing number of cases of fraudulent withdrawals by using cloned ATM cards and said that mostly the perpetrators of this crime are foreigners coming from European countries.
“We have discussed this with high ranking bank officers and they are not willing to take any responsibility as the ATM machines have been outsourced,” he said adding that the person dealing with the ATM machine has insured the machine and hence quite content to recover his losses from the insurance company.
However, the problem is that it is public money that is being wasted. In the first place the money fraudulently withdrawn is public money and then the money paid by the insuring company is also public money.
It is indeed unfortunate that the bank authorities have not accepted the police advisory on security wherein all ATMs are supposed to be compulsorily manned by security guards. Yet many ATM machines function without security guard.
Besides ATMs where there are no transactions in the night have been advised to close them but not a single ATM is shut down in the night and this is another problem as police personnel cannot go around checking all the ATMs specially given the fact that in Margao itself there are over 200 such machines.
So to be totally safe, a concerned citizen will have to keep bare necessary amount in the bank whose ATM card is being used while the other accounts where there is no ATM card used may be where the rest of the amount be deposited.
