Three held in fake credit card shopping scam

Local credit cards fed with secret codes of foreign banks were used to shop at Malad shopping centre; foreigner who supplied cards untraceable

A little knowledge of credit card banking coupled with some conman ingenuity is what they used to make money.

Three people were arrested recently after the Malad police unearthed a nexus of misuse of fake credit cards at a shopping centre in Malad, the police said yesterday.


The CCTV footage for the fraudulent transactions showed the same person buying goods from a cash counter manned by the same cashier

The accused include the promoter of the shopping centre Ganesh Jaiswal, cashier Prathamesh Nayakar and their accomplice Pawan Yadav.

The trio used to 'purchase' goods from the centre using credit cards of HDFC bank, Axis Bank and ICICI bank. These cards, supplied by an as-yet-unidentified foreign national, were fake.

While the face of the card bore the names of these Indian private banks, the secret code embedded in each of the credit cards was that of some foreign bank, the police said.

The transactions had been going on since August this year.

"Jaiswal and Nayakar used to transact purchases by swiping these cards and the goods were handed over to Yadav who used to sell them in the open market," said Sub-inspector Mohan Harpude of Malad police station.
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The sale proceeds were pocketed by the trio." Jaiswal used to then send the payment vouchers for the purchase transactions to the respective banks.

Not our code

"When the banks received the bills, they realised that the secret code of the credit cards was fake. However, the banks made the payment to the promoter of the shopping centre," said Harpude.

However, the banks alerted the police when such transactions took place too frequently. "We tracked down the time of each transaction and looked up the CCTV footage at the shopping centre.

The images pertaining to these transactions showed the same person Yadav walking out of the store with the goods and all the transactions took place at the cash counter manned by Nayakar," said Harpude.

The police then interrogated Nayakar who spilled the beans, leading to the arrest of Jaiswal and Yadav. The police have also recovered two laptops bought from the shop, using the fraudulent manner.

The police have, however, still not been able to trace the foreigner who used to supply the credit cards with the tampered secret code to the accused.