An ex employee of ICICI Bank has reportedly been arrested for duping one of the Canadian Customer, by name Pierre Courtat to the extent of Rs 32 lakhs. The customer held about 61451 Canadian dollars in an account which was nearly dormant. He had called the call center to enquire the status of the account some times back when the employee by name B. Kishore Reddy accessed the personal credential of the account holder such as date of birth etc. Â After observing fro a few days that there was no further transactions in the account, Mr Reddy hatched a conspiracy to rob the amount. For this purpose he opened another account with the help of his wife and her friend, changed the email ID and got the amount transferred to the new account and withdrew through ATMs.
In this incident there is cheating under IPC as well as hacking and other offences under ITA 2008. There is also employee involvement creating vicarious liability on the Bank as well as KYC failure in opening the mule account. There also appears to be a systemic failure which enabled the employee to access sensitive personal data of the customer and its unauthorized modification.
If ICICI Bank does not pay off the customer and close the case, then there is a danger of the top executives of the Bank being held liable.
The incident also reveals the fault lines in the systems as a result of which many other customers often lose money and keep fighting with the Bank on legal front.
It is high time that RBI starts exercising its authority suo moto, recognize the root cause of the fraud and order the Bank to repay the amount to the customer without a legal challenge.
Naavi
