A former ICICI Bank employee, Sakshi Gupta, was arrested for allegedly siphoning off ₹4.58 crore from 41 customer accounts over two years. As a relationship manager in Kota, she reportedly misused the funds hoping for high returns but lost it all.
According to a media report, Sakshi Gupta worked at ICICI Bank’s Shriram Nagar branch in Kota from 2020 to 2023. She was arrested by Udhyog Nagar police on May 31 after a detailed investigation.
Investigators revealed that Sakshi Gupta accessed over 110 accounts of 41 customers between 2020 and 2023 by misusing the ‘User FD’ system and carried out multiple illegal transactions. She allegedly invested the siphoned funds in the stock market, hoping for quick profits.
The fraud continued for over two years without customers realising that their money was being withdrawn.
However, Gupta’s plan backfired as she incurred heavy losses in the stock market and couldn’t return the money to the customers’ accounts. To hide the fraud, she reportedly changed the contact numbers linked to the accounts, preventing customers from receiving transaction alerts.
According to a media report, sub-inspector Ibrahim Khan of Udhyog Nagar police station said, “She linked the phone numbers of her family members to these accounts and withdrew more than ₹4 crore. She even devised a system to receive the OTPs on her system so that the account holders wouldn’t get a whiff of the fraud.”
Khan further said that Gupta used the account of an elderly woman and passed ₹3 crore through it without her knowledge.
“She systematically transferred funds, sometimes using the account of an elderly woman who had no knowledge of the activity as a pool account. By mid-February 2023, over ₹3 crore had passed through that single account,” the police officer was quoted as saying by TOI.
The case came into light only when a customer came to the bank to ask about his FD account. The bank then filed a report with the police on February 18.
ICICI Bank acted quickly after uncovering the fraud, filing an FIR immediately.
“The interest of our customers are of paramount importance to us. Immediately upon discovering the fraudulent activity, we filed an FIR with the police,” a spokesperson told LiveMint.
The bank has suspended Sakshi Gupta and settled claims of affected customers, adding, “We have a zero-tolerance policy against any fraudulent activity and thus suspended the employee involved. We would like to reassure that genuine claims of impacted customers have been settled.”