Mumbai: A multi national bank has registered a case against their own senior official for allegedly committing fraud with the bank and its customers. The suspect is alleged to have diverted money worth Rs 73 lakh of bank's customers to other accounts for his wrongful gain. The bank learnt about this fraud during recent scrutiny when one of the relative of bank's deceased customer had approached to claim her Fixed Deposit (FD) money
According to the police, the complainant in the case is the Vice President (Financial Crime Investigation) Unit of the bank, situated in Goregaon (W). His work is to make inquiries into the suspected fraudulent transactions within the bank. As per his complaint, a woman had an account in the bank's Borivali branch for the past eight years and she had kept her money in the FD. In February last year, the said woman had passed away after which her relatives had approached the bank to enquire about the process to take custody of the money in her account.
Since the lockdown was imposed last year due to COVID-19, the process got delayed. In February, this year, the relatives again made enquiries with the bank and had also raised this issue on the bank's website. The bank complaint redressal department then scrutinised the said account and realised that FD of Rs 53.95 lakh was broken in October 2020. "Bank's enquiry revealed that FD money was transferred to the account of one of bank's customers, who had already expired in 2015 and from his account the money was diverted to another account of a different bank. Probe revealed that the final beneficiary of the money turned out to be one of the employees of the bank, working as a service manager of the Borivali branch," said a police officer from Borivali police station.
"Bank probe also revealed that from May 2018 and October 2020, the suspect had diverted Rs 75.45 lakh on his and his wife's bank account fraudulently. He had also forged documents to carry out the fraud. The bank then made enquiries with the suspect who admitted of having committed the offence and on realising that the bank had evidence against him, he returned back the misappropriated money to the bank. The bank then removed him from service and got a complaint against him under sections 408 (Criminal breach of trust by clerk or servant), 420 (Cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) of the Indian Penal Code," the officer said.
