Hunt on for desi card cloners who love to splurge on foreign products

CHENNAI: After receiving 50 more complaints from credit card users whose cards were cloned and money withdrawn, police say they have pieced together information on a new gang of credit card thieves operating from outside the state.
The complainants said their debit and credit cards were used for online purchases from companies abroad. “I was shocked to see that Rs 4,000 had been withdrawn without my knowledge.Through the bank statement I came to know that someone had made online purchases of stationary items in some foreign country,” Antony Reison from Velachery told The Times of India.
Most of the complainants were from Virugambakkam and Velachery and they have been maintaining accounts in Canara Bank and ICICI bank. “We don’t know how to avoid using our debit and credit cards at ATM and other commercial establishments in the city,” R Mahadevan, another complainant told TOI.
City police had last week arrested a gang headed by a Sri Lankan called Umesh aka Shorty (27). The gang had robbed 64 people in the city of over Rs 30 lakh last month after making fake bank cards. The gang members used a slim skimmer device that they placed inside the card slots of four ATMs in different locations to obtain details of the victim’s card details, including the PIN. The city police arrested the gang’s kingpin, Umesh, a Sri Lankan who had been arrested twice before in similar cases.
On Wednesday, the police received about 20 more complaints. The previous day they got some 40 complaints. “We found that there is another gang operating in a similar manner but based outside the state,” a senior police officer said. Probe revealed the handiwork of a racket headed by a person called Prem. “We have tracked his mobile phone to a tower in Bangalore,” the police officer said.
According to police, the gang is collecting data of cards from Chennai and passed it to other countries where purchases were made using cloned cards, the police said.