The cybercrime wing of the Hyderabad police on Wednesday arrested six persons for allegedly cloning fingerprints of bank account holders and using them to carry out unauthorised transactions. They were members of a gang of eight, which cheated several account holders of ₹10 lakh, the police said.
According to the police, the gang members used Aadhaar-enabled payment system to carry out about 2, 500 transactions.
A investigation was launched after an official of Mumbai-based Fino Payment Bank Limited (FPBL) approached the police and reported that the National Payment Corporation of India in September flagged suspicious transactions linked to one of its merchant terminal ID.
The said terminal was identified as allotted to one K. Srinu, a business correspondent in Hyderabad. The police investigation showed that the accused conspired to make easy money through Aadhaar-enabled payment system.
The gang cloned about 1,000 fingerprints from the soft copies of about 2,500 land registration documents supplied by accused Ch. Narendra. The other arrested are N. Asadharan alias Rupesh, S. Uday Kiran, Md. Iyaz, R. Shiva Krishna and K. Srinu.