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MUMBAI: The cyber crime cell of the city crime branch busted a gang running an online fraud to siphon off crores. By taking advantage of a loophole in a banking system, the gang had made 4,259 fraudulent FASTag recharge-refund claims and siphoned off Rs 20 crore.

A FASTag is fixed onto the windshield of a vehicle, and allows a motorist to make toll payments directly from a linked account, thus reducing the long queues at toll plazas. FASTags use Radio Frequency Indentification (RFID) technology to allow the direct payments.

The cyber crime cell arrested four people from parts of Karnataka who were beneficiaries of the fraud money. The four accused, identified as Purshottam Revanna (40), Kiran Manju (35), Rajesh Shivanna (34) and Rasanna alias Prakash Shivanna (37), were booked under the Information Technology Act and under sections for cheating and forgery of the IPC.

The complainant in the case, a bank, said that they had launched e-wallet services for their customers to purchase FASTags via apps. The bank also purchased software to handle the day-to-day transactions of this system.

After downloading the app, anyone could buy or recharge their FASTags using UPIs, said a police officer. A UPI, or a Unified Payments Interface, powers multiple bank accounts into a single mobile application, merging several banking features under one application.

Initially, the bank investigated the fraud internally, and found that unidentified persons had claimed huge refunds for FASTags. Some of the accounts that had claimed refunds were non-functioning or had zero balance.

A police officer said, "Further technical investigations found that the gang had taken advantage of a loophole in the system to claim 4,259 refunds, and had siphoned the money from the bank ledger account. Between January 2019 and January 2020, the gang made 4,259 recharge transactions on FASTags, and then claimed a refund by showing that the KYC submission was erroneous. They caused a wrongful loss of Rs 19.8 crore."

After forensic investigation, the cyber crime police tracked the beneficiaries of the refunds to Chennai, Bengaluru, and other parts of Karnataka. Four were arrested from Karnataka, while the police are looking for a few more people involved in the racket. The king pin of the fraud is also absconding.

The police added that the investigation would take a little longer to complete, as the accused had transferred money from one account to several different accounts in different parts of the country and withdrawn money from different ATMs, which would take time to track.

