A racket led by an IT officer of Dutch Bangla Bank Limited have allegedly embezzled Tk 2.57 crore by changing the electronic journal of the bank's ATM.

A team of Dhaka Metropolitan Police's (DMP) Cyber ​​and Special Crime Division of Detective Branch arrested four people including the IT officer's wife from different areas in Dhaka and Narayanganj on Tuesday, AKM Hafeez Akter, additional commissioner of DB, told a press briefing yesterday at DMP Media Centre.

Mir Md Shaharuzzaman Rony, a senior officer at DBBL's ADC Division, is the main perpetrator behind the embezzlement, according to DB. He has fled the country, sources in the law enforcement agency said.

"While working at the bank's ATM Monitoring Roaster Team, Rony changed electronic journal of ATM making 1363 transactions through 637 accounts and embezzled Tk 2.57 crore," said the DB official adding that they could not arrest Rony as he has fled the country.

The four arrestees are -- Saima Akhter, wife of Rony; Al-Amin Babu, Mehedi Hasan Mamun and Asaduzzaman Asad.

Describing the process of fraudulence, the DB official said that Asaduzzaman took agent banking membership of Dutch-Bangla Bank under the name of Bismillah BD Enterprise in Narayanganj where a large number of garments workers open salary accounts. Subsequently, Asaduzzaman collected various documents from the workers to open their salary accounts.

Once the accounts and ATM cards were prepared, these were sent to Asaduzzaman for delivery to the account holders. But he didn't give the ATM cards to the customers, but handed over these to Al Amin Babu in exchange of money. Babu credited the collected cards with Tk 20,000, according to DB.

While debiting the money from the ATM, Babu contacted Rony, an IT officer at DBBL. The journal that was created by the ATM booth against the account during the withdrawal was changed by the IT officer before going to the storage server.

Rony disconnected the ATM booths operated through the ESQ ATM monitoring software with the journal storage server just before the withdrawal. Due to the disconnection of the software, the journal generated during the ATM booth withdrawal is not credited to the server.

Following this, Rony converted the 'successful' message into an 'unsuccessful' message, so even if the message later goes to the journal server, it is no longer considered as a successful message. In other words, even after withdrawing money from the booth, the message comes as unsuccessful.

The DB official said that Babu, meanwhile, called the DBBL hotline as planned and complained that he tried to withdraw money from the ATM booth but did not receive the money. Following the complaint, the in-charge of DBBL verified the reliability of the complaint. When the concerned officer saw that the card was inserted in the ATM booth to withdraw money but the journal was 'unsuccessful', the officer adjusted the balance in the account in response to the complaint.

The ring has been embezzling money this way since 2018, the DB official said.

The DB official said they arrested Rony's wife as they found a hefty amount of money in her bank account.

Mosiur Rahman, vice-president of DBBL, told The Daily Star that Rony joined the bank in 2010 and has been working at its ADC Division. In 2018, they first noticed such type of misappropriation.

Asked, he said Rony came to the office two months ago for the last time.

The DBBL official said that they have filed a case with Motijheel Police Station in this connection.