Bank says fraudsters change address through telebanking, leads to such cases
Lokhandwala resident Parvez Sheikh doesn’t own an ICICI bank credit card. Yet, last week, he received a letter from the bank for outstanding dues of Rs 53,000. The letter was addressed to a Senthil Kumar, who Sheikh doesn’t know.
Officers at the Oshiwara Police Station told Sheikh — who runs a travel agency at Santacruz (W) — to speak to the bank.
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But he says he was told by the bank’s debt manager Krishna Pandey to write a letter to the bank, only after which Pandey would give him the all-clear.
“It is clear that the bank hasn’t conducted a physical verification of address before issuing the credit card. Now they want me to do the legwork to prove my innocence,” says an agitated Sheikh.
However, Pandey says that this isn’t the only case and the bank had incurred bad debt of over Rs 3,000 crore from Mumbai, New Bombay and Goa.
“We are in the process of taking legal action against these imposters. They use our telebanking services to change their existing addresses and give a new, fraudulent one,” he added.
Nilesh Dasri, zonal process manager, whose department issues the recovery letters stated that innocent persons getting such letters, had no reason to fear or feel offended as the letter had been sent to verify the facts of the case.
“We have mentioned the contact details of a bank official in the letter. We have an internal department to identify such frauds and have no intention of collecting money from innocent people,” he added.
Sujit Ganguli, head of corporate communications of ICICI Bank Limited, was not available for comment.u00a0
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