CHENNAI: Police are on the lookout for two men who stole at least Rs 48 lakh from 19 ATMs of the SBI across the state, seven of them within the city.
SBI has suspended ATM withdrawals across the country and officials are trying to work out how the men managed to steal the money only from a particular kind of Japanese-made cash deposit machines.
In the past three days, the Chennai police have received seven complaints of cash missing from SBI ATMs.
Camera footage from the ATM kiosk at Vadapalani showed two suspects, one of them wearing a helmet, withdrawing cash three times, a total of Rs 69,000, on June 19.
The incident came to light on Tuesday after the SBI bank officials confirmed Rs 69,000 was unaccounted for.
Similar incidents were reported at six SBI ATM kiosks in Velachery, Taramani, Virugambakkam and Ramapuram.
All the incidents took place between June 17 and 19.
A similar pattern of robberies has also been reported in other states within the last week.
Following this, SBI chief general manager R Radhakrishna met city police commissioner Shankar Jiwal and submitted a complaint.
Radhakrishna told reporters: “As a precautionary measure, we have suspended all SBI withdrawals across India.
The theft took place only through one type of cash deposit machine.” Commissioner Jiwal said, “The robbery took place using a small technical glitch in the machines.
All the 7 cases have been recorded on CCTV cameras.
The footage is being examined.
We will check with other banks if they have had similar thefts.” A special team has been formed led by additional commissioner N Kannan to catch the ATM robbers.
Police sources said preliminary inquiries revealed that the duo had created a savings account in SBI using fake documents and had at least Rs 20,000 cash in it.
Police suspect they used some kind of device to block the sensors of the machines.
They would withdraw cash from the machine and wait till the machine started to pull it back in.
They would then quickly remove the cash but the machine would show it had been deposited back in, is what the cops suspect they did with the help of their device.
SBI officials have got in touch with the machine’s manufacturers in Japan to resolve the issue.
Watch Tamil Nadu: Two loot 19 ATMs with unique trick, SBI suspends cash withdrawal