Seventy Calcuttans who have lost their money to ATM fraud over the past week were called to the city police headquarters at Lalbazar and asked to submit their bank statements for April this year.

Police suspect the skimmers were attached in April but the stolen data was used only in November and December to deliberately create a gap so that CCTV footage captured in April would not be available in the ATMs now.

“We were asked to submit the evidence of money withdrawal from the bank. We have been asked to submit our bank statements starting from April,” said a woman who had lost Rs 19,000 from her account.

An officer of the detective department said almost all the people who turned up at Lalbazar on Thursday could recall that they had withdrawn money from either of the two ATM kiosks at Sulekha in Jadavpur or on Tollygunge Circular Road in Charu Market area in April.

Till on Thursday, 70 people in the city had reported the fraud where someone in Delhi had withdrawn their money that collectively amounts to the tune of Rs 14 lakh.

“We are suspecting this to be the handiwork of a Romanian or Turkish gang. We have sought help from Nepal police because last time the Romanian gang had entered through the Nepal border,” said an officer in Lalbazar.

Calcutta police have also shared the details of the case and the photographs of the suspects that have emerged from the CCTV footage of the south Delhi ATM kiosks from where the money has been withdrawn.

Sources said the city police had spread an alert against the Romanians across the country and sought available information about Romanians residing in any part of the country.

A senior officer said they were not ruling out the possibility of the involvement of Indians in the racket too. “It could be a possibility that to avert any unwanted attention, someone inside Calcutta had helped the gang to fit the skimmers and extract data from the ATMs. The data could have been sold to the Romanians and now they are using it to withdraw money sitting in Delhi,” said a senior officer.

The police have sought the court’s permission for custodial interrogation of the gang of eight Romanians who were arrested for the ATM skimming fraud last year in Calcutta.