AGARTALA, Nov 19 - Police have arrested four suspected ATM hackers from the Belgharia area of Kolkata for their alleged involvement in fraudulently withdrawing crores of rupees through ATM cloning in six cities, including Agartala, in the country.
Following the countrywide uproar over the ATM heist, a crack team of the cyber cell carried out a raid on a hideout in the Belgharia area and nabbed two Turkish hackers, Hakan Zanburkan and Fettah Aldemir, last night.
Following their interrogation, the police also detained two Bangladeshi nationals, Mohammed Hannan and Mohammed Rafiqul Islam.
The hackers are suspected to be involved in the hacking of ATM accounts and fraudulently withdrawal of money in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Dehradun, Kolkata, Guwahati and Agartala.
Police sources said that a four-member cyber security team of Tripura Police has already rushed to Kolkata to bring back the four hackers here by Thursday after fulfilling the legal formalities.
The four suspected hackers had used ATM skimming devices and card cloning to hack accounts for illegally withdrawing money belonging to individual account holders. �The most dangerous thing is that the skimming device or card cloning is a very sophisticated software technology through which one can have power grids paralysed and even satellites crashed,� said a senior official of the Crime Branch, adding that many other sophisticated machines and security codes can be broken through and paralysed by the sophisticated skimming device.
Meanwhile, highly-placed sources from the State Bank of India (SBI) said that a countrywide alert has been sounded for security of ATMs and technical improvements to create a bulwark against attempted hacking.
Amid the outcry, the SBI authorities have promised to return money to all the fraud-affected ATM card holders after fulfilling all banking procedure.
