Woman arrested for siphoning off money from father’s account: Police

A 34-year-old woman was arrested for allegedly siphoning off over Rs two lakh from her retired father’s pension account to get back her gold jewelry mortgaged with a finance company against a loan, police said on Saturday. While transferring money from her father’s account using mobile banking between last November and March this year, the woman used to delete one-time passwords and debit messages from his phone to avoid suspicion, they said.

The police began probing the case on the complaint from a 69-year-old retired employee of an electricity company in which he alleged that Rs 2.03 lakh was debited from his bank’s pension account between November last year to March without his knowledge. He also said that he neither received any OTP for the transactions nor any debit message from the bank, a senior police officer said.

During investigation, the wallets and bank account were analysed and it was revealed that the money was first transferred to e-wallets and later in two bank accounts, the officer said. The first bank account was found registered in the name of the victim’s son-in-law and the second one belonged to his daughter, the officer said. The daughter of the accused was arrested after she admitted that she had transferred the money from her father’s account after adding his ATM card number in her e-wallet and used OTPs received on her father’s mobile phone for the transaction, Deputy Commissioner of Police (North) Sagar Singh Kalsi said.

She further said she used to delete OTPs and debit messages to avoid suspicion, the DCP said. Initially, she transferred low amount from her father’s account to her online wallet, he said, adding when the transaction went unnoticed, she started transferring bigger ammounts.

She siphoned off a total of Rs 2.03 lakh in a few months and used it to get back her mortgaged gold jewelry from the finance company, Kalsi said. Her family is financially weak with her husband being a daily-wager, the DCP said.