Four persons, including sales executive, held for credit card fraud

CHENNAI: The city police's cyber crime cell on Friday arrested four persons for a credit card fraud. Periyanayakam (25) of Tondiarpet, a credit card sales executive for G Cards that was outsourced by SBI, with the help of Yuvaraj (22) of Perambur, Udhayachandran (24) of T P Chathiram and Ramesh Kumar (27) of Ayanavaram diverted credit cards meant for genuine customers to his addresses and misused them.
The police said Peiyanayakam approached existing card holders over the phone and offered them platinum and gold cards. When a person showed interest, he went up to them, got their address and their signature on an application form.
While submitting the form with the bank, Periyanayakam and his associates changed the present address of the applicant and supported it with forged documents. Then they collected the credit cards at the addresses given by forging the signatures and swiped them to purchase jewellery.
The scheme came unstuck following a complaint from V Vijay of HCL, who applied for a credit card through Periyanayakam. When he checked the status of his card application on-line, he found the present address changed and asked the customer care centre to block the delivery of the card. However, this was during the Deepavali holidays when the customer care people did not take immediate steps. The card was then collected by Periyanayakam and gang who swiped it to purchase jewels worth Rs 1.15 lakh. They sold the ornaments and and shared the booty.
After Vijay's complaint was forwarded to the cyber crime cell, a special team under cyber crime wing assistant commissioner D Thangaraj meticulously tracked the accused gang.
"Periyanayakam used his cell phones to contact the customers and we got hold of his number. He was in the habit of changing the SIM cards very often but we busted the network and arrested all the four," Thangaraj said.
Police said the gang forged the papers at the place of Yuvaraj, who owns an audit firm. The gang was involved in six cases of fraud and police recovered proof in two cases.
praveenkumar.8@timesgroup.com