Credit card mafia lands in India

MUMBAI: R.K. Sitaram (not his real) name recently returned from Kuala Lumpur only to discover that someone had misused his Visa card and gone on a shopping spree there.
Luckily for him, the fraud was detected quickly. His bank advised him to destroy it and a new one was issued.
So, how was the fraud perpetrated? When Sitaram used his card for paying hotel bills, a staffer swiped the card on a skimmer device and downloaded the code embedded in the card’s magnetic strip.
The device skims the code which is then used to make a duplicate card.
Sitaram is one many victims whose credit and debit cards are being misused by a mafia whose reach has spread to several south-east Asian countries, especially Thailand and Malaysia.