Man cons 78-yr-old with fake ATM card

In what looks like a new modus operandi, for a conman duped a 78-year-old man at an ATM kiosk in Tambaram on the pretext of helping the senior citizen withdraw his money. 

The conman swapped the old man’s card with an invalid ATM card and retained the original with him. He later swindled Rs 72,000 from the account.  According to a complaint lodged by Lakshmikanthan of Varadarajapuram in Mudichur at Tambaram police station, he went to withdraw money at an SBI ATM in West Tambaram on Wednesday where he was duped by a youth who offered assistance in doing so. 

As Lakshmikanthan was struggling with the instructions on the SBI ATM screen, a youth approached him and offered help. Lakshmikanthan decided to accept the offer and handed over the card to the youth and also gave his ATM PIN number. The youth after entering the pin number told him that there is no money in the ATM and asked him to try some other ATM as he ‘returned’ the card. What Lakshmikanthan failed to notice was the fact that the youth had given him an invalid ATM card. 

The youth tricked him so well that the victim had tried withdrawing cash from a few other ATMs without realising that it was not his card. On Thursday, when Lakshmikanthan went to the bank to lodge a complaint about ‘faulty’ card, the bank executive informed him that the card he had in his hand was not his. 

“It was an expired card that belonged to someone else. Then only he understood that the youth at the ATM kiosk had tricked him by giving an invalid card. “The bank official had also told him that a cash of Rs 40,000 was withdrawn from his account by the trickster, who had also made an online purchase worth Rs 32,000,” Tambaram police said. 

Police said that they had checked the CCTV footage at the ATM kiosk and saw a man, aged around 30, interacting with the victim Lakshmikanthan after which he sped away with another youth on a two- wheeler.