Indian Credit Card Scam Revealed

Many of the UK residents have seen millions siphoned from a credit card scam traced back to India.  A Britain based NRI is on the run.  Five accomplices have been arrested for siphoning at least 21 British nationals of millions of rupees, the Indian currency.  Basically what has happened is that these accomplices have obtained credit card details that they used to charge things.  This scam is an international gang that was unearthed on Tuesday April 1 when New Delhi police arrested five individuals.

The five people arrested were Vivek Prasad 27, Raju Khan 27, Dildar Hussain 32, Nafees Ahmed 37, and Brijesh Yadav 27.  When they were arrested they have 21 fake credit cards on their persons.  The police said that NRI can only be identified as Loknathan.  This fraudster keeps moving between India and Britain and has been operating the scam for the past 3 months.  He is believed to be in Britain at the moment.

Currently the police only know of 21 British individuals who have been a target as they were taken for 3 million rupees in Indian currency.  This occurred when the gang received information encoded on to fake credit cards.  These cards were originally issued by Abbey National, Alliance and Leicester, Barclays, Halifax, Lloyds TSB, National Westminster, and The Co-Operative Bank.  Loknation uses a skimmer in order to take the individuals information from their cards.  A skimmer is a portable device kind of like a pager that is able to read the information encoded on the microchip in the card, according to the police commissioner Anil Shukla.

The device will capture the information, recode it on a new card and then it is sent to the accomplices.  The information can even be stored on the device to download later at a more convenient time.

Loknathan used it during a visit to India where he is usually able to gain information from banks like ABN, AMRO, Citi, HSBC, ICICI, IDBI, Indian Bank, ING, SBI, and even Standard Chartered.  With these credit cards from these banks he then creates fictitious identities in which he reloads the information that has been stolen.  The process of stealing and reloading the information is what is considered cloning.  Vivek managed to procure the fake cards from Loknathan while posing as a business development executive from Hyderabad.

Vivek was actually working in a call centre for HDFC bank previously.  He was unemployed for one month, which meant he had to recruit others in order to run the cards on machines in Delhi.  They would take the owner of the swipe machines into confidence and use the cards until they hit the limits.  The owner would then charge five to six percent of the transaction as commission and pay the rest to Ahmed.

Ahmed and the others would keep 10 to 20 percent of the amount and send the rest on to Vivek.  Vivek would keep 60 percent and the rest would be given to Loknathan through money transfers.  Then those in Britain who have the cards would see the charges.