Bank official steals crores from customers' FDs to invest in stocks, caught
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Kota: A woman bank officer who stole fixed deposits of several customers was caught as her plans to gain returns by investing the loot in stock went wrong.
Sakshi Gupta, a relationship manager of the ICICI bank in Rajasthan's Kota, worked everything out well until an error of judgment in the form market fluctuation landed her in trouble.
The lure of making huge profits in short time led Sakshi Gupta to dupe her customers of more than Rs 4 crore, NDTV reported.
She stole money from the accounts of 41 customers to fund her fraudulent plan that ran for two years, and nobody in the bank knew about it.
The relationship manager misused the 'User FD (Fixed Deposit)' link to withdraw Rs 4.58 crores from 110 accounts of 41 customers between the years 2020 and 2023.
However, she encountered a huge fiasco after the money she invested in the stock market incurred heavy losses.
She was left with no way to return the money to the bank.
The scam came to light when a customer came asking for his FD, leading the bank to file a case on February 18.
Gupta was arrested at her sister's wedding late last night and was sent to judicial custody.
In order to stop customers from receiving transaction message she replaced the customers’ phone numbers linked to their accounts.
Investigating officer Ibrahim Khan said: ‘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.’
The ICICI Bank is reported to be compensating the losses suffered by the customers whose accounts had been wiped clean.
ICICI bank clarified their prompt action in an official statement which read: "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."
