Man arrested for aiding Nigerian hacking bank accounts

Hyderabad, Sep 3: Hyderabad police have arrested a man from West Bengal for aiding a Nigerian hacking bank accounts, particularly of NRIs. The cyber crime police station arrested Sankar Bera on a complaint by a NRI, who was defrauded to the tune of Rs.10 lakh. According to police, L.Jagan Mohan Rao had lodged a complaint in January this year that some fraudsters hacked his bank account and transferred Rs.8 lakh into a HDFC Bank branch in New Delhi and another Rs.2 lakh into an ICICI Bank branch in West Bengal's Purulia. The investigations revealed that the ICICI Bank account is in the name of Sankar and the 22-year-old was arrested early Thursday. He told police that last year he came into contact with a Nigerian named Obakc through Yahoo Messenger chatting. The Nigerian asked him to provide his bank details so as to transfer funds after hacking the bank accounts of NRIs for which he would get 20 percent as commission. An amount of Rs.2 lakh was transferred through NEFT into his ICICI Bank account. Sankar withdrew the amount and after taking his share of Rs.40,000, sent the remaining amount to Obakc through Perfect Money transfer. Police have requested banks to be very diligent while initiating net banking. Before transferring funds, it is very imperative to contact the account holder and mandate holder personally on the given mobile numbers and addresses in KYC (know your customer) forms, they added.