Four duplicate credit cards, shop with them

Four men were arrested for possessing duplicate credit cards on Sunday. Acting on a tip-off, the Ulhasnagar crime branch raided Hotel Dukes Lodging and Boarding in Kalyan and arrested the men.

The police also seized laptop, data capturing machines, encoding and decoding device from them.

“We found 33 credit cards with names while 29 credit cards without names of well known banks such as Standard Chartered, Citibank, ICICI bank, Axis Bank and HSBC bank,” said Senior Inspector Shivajirao Deshmukh of Ulhasnagar Crime Branch.

“We also found few software and databases which were used to duplicate the credit cards.”

They have also seized property worth Rs 10,36,500 including a Honda City, Sony laptop, seven mobile phones, embossing machine, swipe machine, software, databases and few minor tools from the accused.

The accused allegedly had a software to decode pin numbers of the bank customers.

To swipe a card you need to have an identity proof, thus the accused embossed their own name on the card.

As the pin belonged to some other customers, no one would suspect them while they purchased goods with them, said the police.

“These duplicate credit cards were an exact copy of the original cards of the banks. We are inquiring into the modus operandi of this gang,” Deshmukh added.

The accused have allegedly duped many shopkeepers and customers in Bangalore.

The police also recovered two cell phones bought with the fake cards.