Five employees of a cash management firm have been arrested on the charges of inflating the amount of money stolen from an ATM in Bengaluru’s Bellandur area.
Earlier this month, a man entered the Axis Bank ATM on Sarjapur Main Road. His face was covered by a muffler and upon entering, he opened the ATM with a gas cutter within three minutes and soon fled with an unknown amount of money.
As per media reports, the masked man was a member of a gang that had previously targeted four more ATMs in Hassan, Bengaluru and Tamil Nadu.
The police investigation on the incident began after an employee of the cash-in-transit company, AGS Transact Technologies filed a complaint stating that Rs 16 lakh was stolen from the ATM. Secure Value is the company’s subsidiary that takes care of depositing cash into Axis Bank ATMs in southeastern Bengaluru and maintaining the kiosks.
The CCTV footage of the ATM was reviewed and the police found out that the machine did not contain as much money as was mentioned in the complaint. A senior police official told Deccan Herald that this discrepancy suggested that the entire amount of Rs 16 lakh was not deposited into the ATM, thereby raising suspicion about the employees of Secure Value.
The employees tried to load the money into the ATM on July 1, but were unable to do so due to a glitch, even though a receipt was generated, police said.
Following this, on July 6, when the theft occurred, the gang falsely claimed the ATM contained Rs 16 lakh, but the CCTV footage called their bluff, police told DH.
Later in the course of the investigation Rs 13.5 lakh was recovered by the Bellandur police, who also arrested the five employees — identified as Pawan Kalyan, 28, Dharmendra 52, Raghavendra 36, Mahesh 30, and Pratap.
The officials are currently trying to determine how much money was stolen by the masked man on July 6 and track him down.
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