The Tripura government has formed a four-member Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the illegal withdrawal of Rs 16.38 crore from the Agartala Municipal Corporation’s (AMC) bank account using cloned cheques, officials said on Thursday.

A senior official said the Additional Superintendent of Police (Urban), West Tripura district, would lead the SIT and submit a report to the Superintendent of Police, West Tripura district, Namit Pathak.

The other members of the SIT are Sub-Divisional Police Officer (SDPO), Sadar Deba Prasad Roy; Inspector Rana Chatterjee, Officer-in-Charge (OC) of West Agartala Police Station, and investigation officer of the case and Sub-Inspector Ranjit Das.

Tripura Police started an investigation against “unidentified fraudsters” for illegally withdrawing the amount from the bank account of the AMC by using cloned cheques (counterfeit) after the UCO Bank’s Zonal Manager, Sanjib Roy, lodged a case at West Agartala police station. He filed the complaint after it was noticed that Rs 16.38 crore was withdrawn from the AMC account through six cloned cheques last week.

AMC Mayor and BJP MLA Dipak Majumder said that no officer or employee is involved in the fraudulent acts.

The police officer said that, as per the initial investigation, the unidentified fraudsters, operating from Hyderabad, forged the signature of a former AMC officer to withdraw the money from the bank while the original cheques were lying with the civic body.

“Our investigating officer found that original cheques are still in the custody of the AMC officers concerned,” the officer said, adding that they have also collected the CCTV footage from UCO Bank's main branch at Kaman Chowmuhani in the heart of the city and are studying it to determine who had visited the bank to submit the forged cheques.

“Once we identified the persons who had submitted the cloned cheques at the UCO Bank, then it would help us to trace out those involved in the case,” he said.

An AMC official said they have already requested UCO Bank to return the entire Rs 16.38 crore to the civic body’s account, and the bank has agreed.

A similar case had occurred a few years ago, and in that instance, too, the bank returned the money, he said.

Tripura Director General of Police Anurag had said last week that the state police had identified online money fraud worth Rs 46.96 crore since 2021 in Tripura, out of which the authorities were able to hold Rs 5.2 crore and had already returned Rs 34 lakh to the victims.

About the remaining amount, the police are arranging a special drive to return the rest of the money after a few verifications and checks in the next three months, he had told the media.

The DGP said the police have also recovered details of 20,387 bank accounts involved in these cybercrime attacks in Tripura.