Bengaluru: A gang of five men who allegedly cheated several US citizens by using cloned debit cards to swindle money from accounts have been arrested by the Upparpet police. The police not only recovered Rs. 5.8 lakh, but also seized data capturing machines worth Rs. 25 lakh from them. The accused have been identified as Jai Kumar alias Shyamavelu, 42, Irfan Ahmed, 32, Waseem Sharif, 26, Tajmul Ahmed, 37, and Raghavendra alias Raghu, 33.
The accused, through their contacts in Mumbai, Jaipur, Hyderabad and Chennai, who provided them a large database of debit cards belonging to many US citizens and other European countries and cloned them using the data capturing machine. They had opened bank accounts and obtained card swiping machines from banks, claiming that they were running a business out of City Centaur in Gandhinagar.
They accused ran a shop in Gandhinagar called Roland Magic and Swipe where they swiped cloned cards and transferred the amount to various bank accounts in their names.
The police have taken the accused into custody for further investigations.
Among the accused Jayakumar, booked for multiple cases of a similar nature, used to purchase data of credit and debit card through his contacts living abroad. He was booked by the police of Jayanagar, Sampigehalli, Cottonpet, Tamil Nadu and the City Crime Branch for similar offences earlier. “Earlier he cloned debit cards of Indians. As it landed him in trouble”, the police said.
“They told us that the man in Mumbai got details of debit cards through his links with cyber criminals in the US. The gang members shared the money they got from swiping of the cloned cards. We are investigating whether they duped citizens of any other country. We still don’t know how much money they made through these cards,” the police said.
Laptops, computers, five Electronic Data Capture (EDC) machines, five mobile phones, more than 15 cloned debit cards ,three cars,around Rs 30 lakh, and encoders were seized from the arrested.