Major credit card racket busted, 6 held

Major credit card racket busted, 6 held
Preetu Nair ,TNN

PANAJI: Panaji police busted an international credit card fraud involving cloning of cards and using them to gamble in offshore casinos in Goa on
Friday.

Police say they cracked the racket after arresting six persons from Mumbai and suspect that those arrested may allegedly be part of a group which either collected or hacked legitimate credit cards from Europeans and encoded them on fake credit cards created in India.

“We have arrested six persons in a credit card scam and we suspect it to be an international racket involving several persons. We have got 14 days police custody of the accused and further investigations are on,” Panaji police station in-charge (I) PI Sandesh Chodankar said.

Police suspect this to be just the tip of the iceberg and hundreds of credit and debit cards owners, especially from Europe, could be affected.

“The first four digits of a card indicate the card’s originating country. A majority of them are from European countries, especially Germany and England,” said police sources.

A team led by Panaji police station in-charge (II) PI Francisco Corte arrested five persons on Thursday afternoon for suspicious behaviour. The sixth person Bhupendra Shukla, staying in another city hotel
, was arrested when he approached the Panaji police station on Thursday itself and attempted to furnish a character certificate in support of his five friends.

Police said the six persons had earlier visited Goa in July. Five of them arrived by air on Wednesday from Mumbai and booked into a hotel at Miramar and visited an offshore casino the same day, where they allegedly used the fake credit cards to earn “white money”.

8 August 2009,The Times of India, Goa edition