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  detectives arrested four people including the IT officer's wife from different areas in Dhaka and Narayanganj yesterday, AKM Hafiz Akhtar, additional commissioner (DB) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police told a press briefing today at DMP media centre.

Mir Md Shaharuzzaman Rony, a senior officer at DBBL's Alternative Delivery Channels Division, is the main perpetrator behind the embezzlement, said DB.

"While working at the bank's ATM monitoring roster team, Rony changed electronic journal of ATM -- making 1,363 transactions through 637 accounts and embezzled Tk 2.57 crore," Hafiz said. Rony has fled the country.

Shaharuzzaman Rony. Photo: Collected

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

While 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 garment 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. He didn't give out the ATM cards to the customers. Instead, the cards were given 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.

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 concerned in-charge verified the reliability of the complaint. When the officer saw that the card was inserted in the ATM booth to withdraw money but the journal was "unsuccessful", he adjusted the balance in the account in response to the complaint.

In such a way, the group has been embezzling money since 2018, the DB official said.

The DB official said, they arrested Rony's wife as they found a significant 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.