KARACHI: Police on Wednesday arrested two Chinese men for allegedly planting a skimming device in a Habib Bank Limited ATM in Zainab Market to steal data of its customers.

Saddar SP Tauqeer Muhammad Naeem told Dawn that the two men entered an ATM booth of the HBL on main Abdullah Haroon Road near Zainab Market and instead of drawing cash they were seen doing some suspicious activity in the real-time surveillance feed.

Those watching the feed alerted the bank staff, who tried to catch them, but they ran away, the SP said, adding that the incident drew the attention of the area people who managed to get hold of the two Chinese men.

A police patrol also reached the scene and took them into custody. The law enforcers recovered a skimming device from them, he added.

FIA says it works in close liaison with Chinese officials

The officer suspected that the same device had been used in recent ATM fraud cases in the metropolis.

He said that the held foreigners, identified as Zhang Qiaocheng and Zhong Showen, had also visited the same ATM around three days ago. They came to Pakistan on Jan 2 on business visas, the SP said.

Later, the held suspects were handed over to the cybercrime cell of the Federal Investigation Agency for further legal action.

The director of the FIA’s Sindh zone, Dr Amir Ahmed Shaikh, told Dawn that the Wednesday arrests came following a high-level meeting in which the FIA urged the State Bank of Pakistan and all commercial banks to be more vigilant and avoid possible ATM fraud.

He said that an FIA investigation team was currently tracing a Chinese man who was recently seen doing suspicious activity in the CCTV footage of an ATM in a Clifton shopping mall.

The FIA had alerted all bank officials concerned, particularly of the HBL’s, to make sure timely surveillance of their ATMs since it was observed that they did not bother to watch the footage for several days, he said.

The FIA official said that the agency was also working on other strategies and methods particularly to identify the Chinese nationals and avoid such ATM frauds in future.

“We are also analysing the pictures of Chinese suspects with those saved in the database of an identification system installed at Karachi airport,” he said, adding that the agency got full cooperation from Chinese diplomats stationed in the metropolis.

Recently, cases of ATM fraud had emerged in Karachi and other parts of the country.

The HBL had confirmed that over Rs10 million had been stolen from 559 of its customers’ accounts through bogus ATM, credit and debit cards. The transactions had been traced to Indonesia, China, and other countries, the bank had said.

The FIA investigation officers looking into this ATM fraud had observed that the use of “obsolete technology” by banks for ATMs and decades-old security systems employed at ATM booths have made them an easy target for any “organised foreign group”.

In June 2016, the FIA had arrested a Chinese national for allegedly stealing data from a private bank with skimming devices at one of its ATM facilities.

The arrest came after the bank management approached the FIA for its assistance when they observed suspicious activity of two foreigners at their Plaza Square branch. The management through monitoring the CCTV cameras footage installed inside the ATM facility noticed that the foreigners spent an unduly long time there though for not any visible job.

After the arrest, the FIA formally launched investigations into the matter, which led to the recovery of some electronic equipment, two skimming devices, each having a 16GB memory card, Chinese passports and identity cards of the suspects and different cards of Chinese banks.

After thorough investigation the officials were convinced that it was an attempt to access the bank’s data with the skimming devices.

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2018