One would think their money is safest in a bank. But, in a shocking case, this bond of trust was leveraged by a woman officer of a bank in Rajasthan's Kota to dupe customers of more than Rs 4 crore. Reason: The lure of generating high returns in a short period by investing in stocks. And, she used the money in the accounts of more than 41 customers to achieve that. The fraud continued for two years, but no one in the bank had any idea about it.
Sakshi Gupta, who was the relationship manager of the ICICI bank, misused the 'User FD (Fixed Deposit)' link and illegally withdrew Rs 4.58 crores from 110 accounts of 41 customers between the years 2020 and 2023. Ms Gupta, as per the probe, invested the money in the stock market. She, however, failed to deposit the money back in the accounts after she incurred heavy losses in the market. She has now been arrested and sent to judicial custody. The police arrested her at her sister's wedding late last night.
The scam came to light when a customer came to the bank to inquire about his FD. The bank then filed a case with the police on February 18.
The woman even changed the mobile numbers of the customers linked with the accounts so that they would not know about the transaction messages.
"She linked the phone numbers of her family members to these accounts and withdrew more than Rs 4 crore. She even devised a system that she used to get the OTPs on her system so that the account holders don't get a whiff of the fraud," said investigating officer Ibrahim Khan.
The ICICI Bank said in a statement that they have filed an FIR and suspended the employee.
"The interest of our customers is of paramount importance to us. Immediately upon discovering the fraudulent activity, we filed an FIR with the police. We have a zero-tolerance policy against any fraudulent activity and thus suspended the employee involved. We would like to reassure that genuine claims of impacted customers have been settled," said an ICICI Bank spokesperson.
A customer arrived at the bank to check if his money was safe after he learned about Ms Gupta's arrest. "I heard that Sakshi Gupta duped people of Rs 4 crore. I came here to check if my money was safe or not," said Mahavir Prasad.
"Where should we keep our money? We can't keep it at home, now we can't keep it with the bank. What should we do?" he asked.
