Police in Bangladesh have detected an east European national allegedly involved in ATM forgery, days after a series of incidents of fraud rattled banks and customers in the country, officials said today.
"We kept five foreigners with nearly identical appearances under surveillance for the past few days. We are nearly confirmed that at least one of them - an east European - is one of the culprits," a police spokesman said.
Dhaka Police's Counter-Terrorism and Transnational Crime unit chief Monirul Islam, however, did not name any country but said all the five were nationals of different east European nations.
But he said police was likely to detain the key suspect any time and launch an investigation if any bank official was involved in the fraudulence.
The private Eastern Bank Limited (EBL) on February 12 detected 21 suspicious card transactions after fraudsters with a fake EBL card used one of the ATM booths of another private bank, United Commercial Bank, which sounded off the alarm in UCB's system.
Bank officials said the fraudsters installed skimming devices on February 7 and withdrew money from personal accounts of a number of people on February 11.
Today's development came after Bangladesh Bank, three commercial banks and police analysed video footage of four ATMs from where at least 2.5 million Takas (USD 31,000) were skimmed off.
A central bank spokesman earlier said they believed at least two foreigners were directly involved in the crimes.
The fraudulence forced banks to take precautionary measures, including temporarily shutting down transactions through the national payment switch (NPS), to safeguard the interests of clients.
Bangladesh Bank said victims of the fraudulence would be compensated with the EBL assistance tomorrow.
