Rats blamed for shredded banknotes inside Indian ATM

Technicians who arrived to fix a malfunctioning cash machine in the Indian state of Assam got a shock when they opened it up.

Notes worth more than 1.2m rupees (£13,300; $17,600) had been shredded - and the suspected culprits are rats.

Police said the rodents probably entered the machine through a hole for wiring, the Hindustan Times reported.

Pictures of the chewed cash at the State Bank of India branch in Tinsukia district were widely shared on Twitter.

One shows a dead rodent lying in the debris.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Rats chew up ₹12 lakhs in cash at an ATM in Tinsukia, Assam- the out-of-service ATM was left locked for a month in Tinsukia, Assam (ATM maintenance staff retrieved around ₹17 lakh in undamaged notes when they went to service the cash machine).</p>&mdash; Sayoni Aiyar (@sayoniaiyar) <a href="https://twitter.com/sayoniaiyar/status/1008706958218518528?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">June 18, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Police official Prakash Sonowal said that the machine had been out of action for about 12 days, the Hindustan Times added.

Technicians who took the unit apart found banknotes of 2,000 and 500 rupee denominations destroyed. They managed to salvage another 1.7m rupees, officials said.

SOURCE:BBC NEWS
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