: When the Kochi police arrested Muhammad Sabid on charges of credit card fraud on August 2, little did they know that it would open the lid of a financial crime trail leading all the way to Pune, Maharashtra.
Even as a local court in Pune will on Monday consider an application by the Kochi police to get custody of three members of the fraud racket, a team of the Ernakulam Central police station has already begun interrogating them. The trio, identified as Numan, Ajmal and Irfan, all natives of Kasaragod, were reportedly planning to leave for Nepal when they landed in police custody.
Last week, the police had picked up two Karnataka natives, Hamza Moideen and Basheer Mohammed, from Kasaragod in connection with the case. An interrogation of the duo revealed that the accused used to clone credit cards by encoding data of account holders in various banks.
Using the cards, they purchased articles including high-end electronic gadgets, which were later sold at a relatively cheaper price in Pune.
“We expect to get details of the money duped by the racketeers and persons involved in the scam, which would run into several lakh of rupees, by interrogating the accused in Pune,” said a senior officer.
From three stores
The fraud came to light when one of the accused, Muhammad Sabid, on July 27 made purchases from three stores using the fake credit cards. The accused shopped at two mobile phone shops at Penta Menaka and a jewellery shop in Kochi.
As the stores had received money on card purchases immediately, shop owners came to know about the fraud only after they received information from banks that money was being credited from the accounts of random persons.
Sabid, while employed in a shop, had collected credit card data of several customers by swiping their card in another machine besides the original machine. The probe will also focus on whether Sabid had sold the stolen data to fake card rackets elsewhere.
