Delhi Police busts credit card racket- arrested five in Delhi and UK NRI is on the run

New Delhi, April 02, 2008
Santosh Kumar

Delhi Police Crime Branch arrested five people- Vivek Prasad, 27, Nafees Ahmed, 37, Raju Khan, 27, Brijesh Yadav, 27, Dildar Hussain, 32, in south Delhi and recovered 21 fake credit cards from them. The racket has exposed the negative side of the technology advancements.

Deputy Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch, Anil Shukla told media in New Delhi:

• More than 20 UK residents were cheated of Rs.3 million (30 lakh with the help of cloned credit cards) after the gang obtained information encoded on their credit cards issued by seven British banks such as Barclays Bank andLloyds TSB Bank.....
• The police intercepted a Maruti Wagon car at Netaji Subhash Place and arrested the persons. A case of cheating and fraud has been lodged against them with Saraswati Vihar police station.
• NRI Loknathan in UK used to swipe his victim credit card on a skimmer, a small portable device like a pager that records all the information encoded in the microchip of the card. Loknathan has been operating the scam for the past three months.
• In UK, the owner of credit card does not pay if any fraud involved. The loss was either borne by the bank or by the insurance company. Since the fraud occurred in India no one pursues the matter from UK.

According to the police, the group had at least eight such transactions in the past three months. They carefully used a credit card once and never visited the shopping area again.. They used to swipe the cloned credit cards with the help of shopkeepers and owners of the swipe machines.

Mostly they bought jewelry, laptops and mobiles worth lakhs of rupees and collected cash return by paying 5-6% commission to the swipe machine owners

Vivek Prasad, Banglore University graduate, worked as business development executive in a firm in Hyderabad is the mastermind of the racket. He used to procure information on credit cards from one of his associate, Loknathan in UK. Loknathan used to visit India often for the past six months.

Vivek then collaborated with Ahmed, who used to run a call centre for the HDFC Bank. Ahmed and his recruits to run these cards on swipe machines in Delhi. With the help of swipe machines owners, they used the card depending on its credit limit. Ahmed and his friend were keeping 10-20% of the amount.

Vivek transferred 40% of the transaction to Loknathan in UK.