Man dupes SBI’s travel card platform

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a case against a person for fraudulently manipulating the database of State Bank of India’s foreign travel card, resulting in a loss of ~93 million for the lender.

This is a prepaid travel card, for use at stores abroad. The agency’s formal first information report (FIR) was based on a complaint by SBI a year before, on February 28, 2017, to its economic offences wing.

The FIR names a Sandeep Poojary, employee of Yalamanchili Software Exports (YSE). The company provides personnel for handling the travel card operations of of SBI.

The fraud took place from November 2016 to February 2017. The complaint, from Sagar Mazumdar, deputy general manager at the bank, says Poojary had issued three travel cards to his name between November and December 2016 from SBI’s NRI Seawoods branch, Navi Mumbai.

He did not recharge these. As he was a YSE employee, Poojary had access to the card’s database — using which, he altered the balance in the prepaid card system regarding transactions from the three cards. Poojary did 374 transactions amounting to ~93 million from November 8, 2016, to February 12, 2017.

The transactions mainly were over e-commerce websites of four merchants and involve primarily four merchant sites — Neteller.com, Entropay.com, Swiftvoucher and SKR*Skrill.com. All the merchant transactions came via VISA, with the merchant country code as Britain, the transactions and billing currency in dollars.