Card cloning gang busted by Kherwadi police, gang withdrew crores from innocent individuals account
The Kherwadi police claimed to have busted a high profile card cloning gang after arresting five people in this connection, all the accused are very high tech and used the latest technology to withdraw huge sums from innocent individual’s accounts.
Shockingly, the gang collected the debit/credit card details from well known cafes, restaurants, shopping centers and other establishments where people used their cards.
Interestingly, this gang collected the details with the help of people who were working in restaurants, cafes and shopping centers after paying Rs 1000-2000 to them for each card.
According to Kherwadi police sources, on the basis of reliable information they formed a special team and after the hard work of one week they came to know that arrested accused Akram Mehboobali Sheikh and Faiz KaramHussain Chowdhary are the mastermind of scam, while other three, Altaf Aftab Sheikh, Sarfaraz Shamsuddin Sheikh and Rahul Devnarayan Yadav are associates of this gang.
Accused Altaf worked in the well known Alimentria bakery situated in BKC and he provided debit/credit card information to this gang. Bank officials who got regular complaints about the card cloning incident were shocked when they found most of the cards which were cloned were used in Alimentria bakery first and later cloned by the gang.
Without wasting any time bank officials informed Kherwadi police and a team under the guidance of Yadav and API Sachin Suryavanshi was set up. On the basis of suspicion, Altaf was picked up, he later confessed to his participation in the crime and revealed other accused names, who were later arrested from their residences at Motilal Nagar-Goregaon, Oshiwara, Malwani, BKC and Bandra, police said.
All the arrested accused are college drop outs while accused Akram and Faiz earlier worked for another card cloning gang but after leaving them, both the accused formed their own team and have been regularly doing this work in the last six months.
Till now they had gained access to crores from thousands of innocent people ‘s bank accounts, but the exact figure will be revealed after the banks provide the data and how much money they had managed to siphon off. They had data of all the bank customers accounts including ICICI, HDFC, etc.
Seven Portable Magnetic Strip Card Readers (Pocket Skimmers) which they used to withdrew the cash, two laptops, debit/credit cards of different banks, cloned cards, software, MSR Data reader/writer machine and other equipment were recovered from their possession, police added.
''All the accused are arrested under relevant Sections of IPC including 408, 409, 468, 420, 34 IPC and IT act, they will be produced before the Bandra Court today,'' Senior Police Inspector from Kherwadi Police Station, Rajendra Patil said.