It was Mayday for Neeraj Jain and Naresh Nodia when they received SMS alerts on May 1 stating that large sums of money were withdrawn from their accounts in the United States. Gradually, it turned out that Jain and Nodia were not the only victims of this fraud.

At least 50 salaried people of Delhi-NCR employed with companies located at Unitech Cyber Park, in Gurgaon, lost their hard-earned money after swiping their debit cards at an HDFC Bank ATM in the IT hub.

As the month started, these people were planning to pay their monthly dues, bills, rents, etc. but on May 1, they received SMS alerts informing them of the fraudulent transactions.

Within two days of Jain and Nodia lodging police complaints, the other victims too approached the police. Police investigation revealed that a device installed in the ATM machine cloned the cards and provided their details.

It is suspected that the device was installed in April and the scamsters collected data of all those who swiped their cards. They waited till end of April and as soon as people received their salaries, money from their accounts was transacted.

Shubhankar Chawla, a victim of the scam, tweeted: "I lost my 22,536 INR on 1st May at 3:08 am after using my ICICI bank debit card at HDFC ATM in Unitech Cyber Park's ground floor. (sic)"

Manish Arora, who works at a private firm, lost Rs 1.1 lakh. Similarly, Bharat Bhushan tweeted: "I lost 50K yesterday in this fraud. This is big money for us all. I think, this is happening due to Unitech Cyber Park ATM in Gurgaon Sec 39 (sic)."

Akash, who works at a private firm, tweeted: "What is going on HDFC? I have almost 15 users from my office which are victims of debit card fraud. ATM at Unitech Cyber Park is compromised. What should we do? Too much money on stake."

HDFC Bank has promised to refund the money to the victims. Neeraj Jha, head of corporate communication, HDFC bank, Mumbai, tweeted: "An incident involving our ATM in Gurgaon has come to our notice. While a police complaint is being filed, matter will be investigated to get to the bottom of this, we'd like to assure all customers that there'll be no financial loss to them. Deeply regret the inconvenience."

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