Hyderabad: The city police on Friday, March 1, apprehended two officials of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) over alleged wage robbery through a fingerprint cloning scam.
As many as 35 synthetic fingerprints, along with two attendance biometric devices, were also seized from them. Over the last two years, the duo has diverted Rs 80 lakh, police said.
After learning to clone thumb impressions from YouTube, the GHMC supervisors made thumbprints of sanitation workers who did not even attend work and marked their attendance to claim their wages.
The accused, identified as Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation sanitation supervisors P Shivaiah Umesh and J Shivaram allagedly cloned the thumb impressions of sanitation workers by pressing their thumbs onto a layer of candle wax and creating duplicate fingerprints using M-Seal, Fevicol, Dendrite glue, or wax.
According to official sources, the sanitation workers were made to press their thumbs onto candle wax. After that, they poured Fevi gum on the wax to take the print. They used this layer containing the worker’s thumb impression to mark their attendance on the biometric scanner for absentees.
The interrogation revealed that the accused had been cheating for the last two years, and every day at least 20 workers would not show up for each shift, causing a loss of Rs 3.6 lakh every month and Rs 43.2 lakh for one year. Since both officials have been doing the fraud for the last two years, the figures come around Rs 86.4 lakh, the police said.
Further details are awaited.
