RBS loses £93,000 in simple cash deposit scam

A businessman conned the Royal Bank of Scotland out of £93,000 in a ludicrously simple scam that exploited the bank's cash envelope deposit system.

  0 4 comments

RBS loses £93,000 in simple cash deposit scam

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Thirty-year old Senthuran Gopalakrishnan was jailed for one-year for the fraud in which he pretended to deposit £155,000 over an eight-day period, when in fact he had only banked £62,000.

The bank's Fast Cash deposit system required customers to place the cash in a sealed envelope and write down the total on the cover. This sum was immediately credited to customer accounts.

At a hearing, Gopalakrishnan admitted that between 29 June and 6 July last year he deposited a number of envelopes which contained inflated details of the amounts of cash inside, netting a cool £93,000 windfall.

The fraud was only uncovered five days later when a different department counted the actual sums in the envelopes.

The £93,000 excess withdrawn by Gopalakrishnan was never recovered.

The bank says it has since changed the system.

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Comments: (4)

John Dring

John Dring Digital Services and mCommerce at Intel Network Services

Not bad. Probably out in 6 months and free meals too - that's almost a politicians salary, but with a criminal record to boot.

What a crazy silly system.

A Finextra member 

Not forgetting it will be an open low security prison where he will do gardening duties and helping the community!

Keith Appleyard

Keith Appleyard IT Consultant at available for hire

I've used this system over many years. I always assumed that RBS staff opened the envelope and under a dual control procedure verified the contents before creditting the account.

Something must have gone seriously amiss for them to simply trust the number on the outside of the envelope and not check the contents.

What if I never put anything inside the envelope other than the Credit Slip - could I then claim that they must have lost/stolen the Cash?

A Finextra member 

I guess following the correct practice of crediting the amount only after opening the envelope by two officers of the bank would have avoided this....

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