Son of former SBI employee held for opening fake bank branch in Tamil Nadu

Chennai, July 11: Son of former SBI employee, including three people have been arrested by the Tamil Nadu police for running a duplicate branch of State Bank of India.

The fraud bank has been running as an SBI branch in Panruti has been busted in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu.

The plan to run a duplicate bank was hatched by the 19-year-old Kamal Babu, son of former bank employees.

Kamal Babu's father passed away 10 years ago and his mother Lakshmi retired from a bank two years ago. Kamal, who was unemployed, came up with the idea of duplicating a branch of SBI.

The duplicate branch was opened three months back.

It came under lens when an SBI customer noticed it and informed his Branch manager.

The matter was later escalated to the Zonal office, and it informed that only two branches of SBI are running in Panruti, there was no third branch opened in the area.

The SBI officials who visited the duplicate branch were stunned seeing the entire set up which exactly looked like a bank branch.

The officials immediately filed a complaint and three people were arrested.

As per the report, the police arrested three people including the mastermind, Kamal Babu, an unemployed youth whose parents were former bank employees. The other two who were arrested by the police, include a person, Kumar (42), who runs the printing press from where all the receipts, challans were printed and the other person, Manickam (52), owns a rubber stamp making company, printed rubber stamps.

The police have said that no transactions had taken place in the branch and no one has been duped so far by the bank.

On a same note, in 2018, Uttar Pradesh Police had arrested a man, Aafaq Ahmed for opening a fake branch of the Karnataka Bank in Ballia city. Police recovered Rs 1.37 lakh in cash which Ahmed had collected by opening savings and fixed deposits accounts for local residents.