KOCHI: The investigation into the Rs11.5-lakh online banking fraud will be extended to nine more states. Nine teams, comprising Cyber Cell officials, will be formed to carry out the probe in states including, Andhra Pradesh, Maharahtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and West Bengal. According to sources, the statements of the victim, Dr Shabeer Khan, a doctor with the Lakeshore hospital here, bank officials and officials of the mobile network operators have been recorded.“The swindled money has been transferred to different accounts in nine states. It was a planned operation and the culprits were believed to be plotting it since the last three weeks. The bank statements showed that at least 12 persons are involved in the operation. The culprits have obtained a duplicate SIM card by submitting a copy of the fake passport of the doctor,” investigation officer D S Suneesh Babu said.“The money was transferred to 20 accounts of three private sector banks. By the time the bank authorities could freeze the accounts, the entire amount was withdrawn. A youth from Kolkota is also suspected to be involved, but he has gone missing,” the police officials said.Reportedly, the police are finding the case a hard nut to crack since they had no prior experience dealing with such a ‘hi-tech’ case.“We do not have high-tech facility to investigate the case. The cooperation of the police officials in other states is required to investigate the case,” the Cyber Cell officials said.The culprits, who managed to secure the online ID and password of Dr Khan’s account, requested the bank for another password.The mobile number, to which the new password was sent, was used for completing the transaction. The doctor came to know about this only when he found out that the SIM card has been blocked on March 30. The police are yet to ascertain how the culprits were able to access the ID and password of the doctor. “We suspect that the doctor might have been cheated by some phishing mails or the account details might have leaked when he used the debit card. We also have to check whether any Trojan malware was used to access the account details. For this Cyber Cell is inspecting the laptop used by the doctor,” a police official said.
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