Police today arrested a youth accused of cheating a woman by using her debit card.
Police said on 20 July, 2018, a woman of Lal Bazar sought help from a stranger at an automatic teller machine (ATM), asking him to withdraw Rs 1000 from her account.
“I hold an account in J&K Bank. But I was in hurry and wanted to make transaction at any nearby ATM as I had to purchase some books for my son. I found UCO Bank ATM at Lal Chowk,” the woman said.
As she tried to make the transaction, the ATM screen displayed instructions in Hindi language which she was not familiar with. “There was a youth and I requested him to withdraw money from my account,” he said.
“I handed over debit card to him and shared my personal identification number (PIN) with a request to complete transaction. As I left the ATM, I received two consecutive SMSs from bank that my account was further debited with Rs 4000 and Rs 10000 respectively,” she said.
“I was shocked and approached concerned bank branch. I was told that both these transactions were made through her debit card. Then bank officials noticed that the youth has cheated me and instead on returning my ATM card, he has changed it with some other defunct card,” she said.
“I was worried as I had saved my hard earned money for admission of my son in engineering for which last date was approaching. For a while many questions surrounded my mind. I was shattered. I felt as my son would not be able to get admission in engineering now due to non availability of fee,” she said.
Subsequently she submitted a complaint in police station Maisuma. “Police was kind. They treated me as their sister and assured that the accused will be brought to book. They immediately started investigation and launched a manhunt to nab the accused,” she said.
“We arrested the accused Tufail Ahmad Sheikh, of Gadapora, Shopian recovered money from him. It took us some time to get footage of ATMs where the accused had made fraudulent transactions. We also recovered the money from him. The accused has been booked in FIR 26/208 for the offences of theft and cheating,” said Sajad Assad, SHO Maisuma police station.
Sajad thanked general public for their cooperation in solving this case. “People helped us in identification of the accused,” he said. The victim hailed the efforts of police especially the SHO.