5 held for scamming banks through NID forgery
Some NID wing employees were involved in the scams
Detectives have arrested five people for swindling a large amount of money from banks in the name of home loans using fake national identification cards, trade licences, and other documents.
The arrestees are Al Amin, Hasan Imam Bidyut, Abdullah Al Shahid, Rezaul Islam, and Shah Zaman.
Police arrested them from Khilgaon and Rampura areas in the capital on Tuesday night while investigating two money misappropriation cases.
Investigators said the five had taken out loans of several crores of taka from 11 banks and non-bank financial intuitions, including Jamuna Bank, First Leasing, People's Leasing, NRBC Bank, Dutch-Bangla Bank, City Bank, former Union Bank, Premier Leasing, Dhaka Bank, Phoenix Leasing, and One Bank.
Briefing reporters on Wednesday, Dhaka Metropolitan Police Additional Commissioner for the detective branch AKM Hafiz Akter said some employees of the NID wing of the Election Commission had been involved in the scams.
He said the five men are members of a professional fraud gang.
"They used to communicate with real owners of flats and plots to buy and sell those and visit different banks introducing themselves as prospective buyers. They would show NID cards and flat documents to convince the bank authorities to issue loans," said Hafiz.
With the help of some NID wing officials, they would then hack into the NID server and change the images in their targeted NID cards. The bank authorities, while verifying NID cards, would thus be convinced of the documents and sanction loans.
The gang would also use forged TIN certificates to obtain bank loans.
They swindled Tk1.7 crore from Dhaka Bank with forged documents and two cases were later filed with Paltan and Khilgaon police stations in this connection.
Police arrested a man named Biplob on Sunday while investigating the cases. Using information gleaned from him, the five men were arrested two days later.
Hafiz said police had informed the authorities concerned of the NID forgery issue.
"The authorities said they had already sacked 44 employees. Some of them were involved in the scam before they had been fired."
Meanwhile, the Election Commission has filed 556 cases across the country and blocked 1,057 NID cards over forgery.