Making money thru' credit card forgery
Working with foreign fraudsters, a gang here in Bangladesh has been stealing Tk 50-60 lakh a month from holders of international credit cards by cloning cards.
The gang has been charging the cloned cards at dodgy shops and the shops paid them back the money taking about 20-25 percent cut.
Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) detained 11 members of such a gang for their alleged involvement in the forgery, said Mufti Mahmud Khan, director of Rab's legal and media wing, at a press briefing held yesterday at its media centre in Karwan Bazar.
Acting on a tip-off, a team of Rab-10 conducted drives in different areas of the capital over the last two days and detained the 11.
The gang has an international contact, who provide them with technical data, claimed Rab.
Mufti said prime accused Shah Aziz Sohel, 36, was trained in card cloning when he used to live in Dubai. There Sohel had met US citizen and fraudster Erin Limo, the Rab official said.
Sohel continued with card cloning after returning to Bangladesh. He has been involved in this criminal activity for the last 10 years, said a Rab press release.
Staying in touch with Erin and taking in Rana, 24, Sohel started card forgery and identity theft in Bangladesh. The gang cloned foreigner's international cards to reduce the risk of capture.
Sohel's foreign cohorts supplied him with the magnetic strip data of international cards.
“Sohel wrote the track number in blank cards using MSR (Magnetic Stripe Reader) machine and made it ready for use,” claimed Mufti.
MSR allows the reading and writing of data from a credit/debit card's magnetic strip, the press release said.
The gang took some dishonest shop owners in Bangladesh onboard. The shop owners helped them charge the cards and realise the money.
Rab claimed that Nur e Alam, 45, a trade license department official of Dhaka North City Corporation, used to be the middle man between the fraudsters and the colluding shops.
Based on the arrestees' information, Rab detained five shopkeepers who were identified as Johirul Islam, 37, Lutfar Rahman Sujon, 42, Abdul Ali, 40, Jahangir Hossain, 45, and Jalal Hossain Sumon, 27.
Sumon was said to be the patron of the gang and the person who supplied the gang with all sorts of equipment.
The other detainees are: Parvez, 23, Wahed, 20, and Kamruzzaman Sumon, 30.
During the drives, Rab recovered computers, laptops, printers, MSR machine, 200 cards of various banks, 1,000 blank cards and six Swap machines and other equipment for making clone cards.
Asked, how the gang got hold of blank cards, Mufti said they might have brought them in from abroad.
They chose shops for the transactions since ATM booths have surveillance systems installed, Mufti said.
Rab claimed that around Tk 50 to 60 lakh were stolen every month by the gang and that Tk 5 to 6 crore had been stolen over the last five years.
In February last year, Rab held eight members of such a gang.
A week ago, 30 people, including six Bangladeshis, had been arrested at Queens, New York and charged for credit card and identity theft. Several business owners were among those indicted.
Abul Kashem Mohammad Shirin, managing director of Dutch-Bangla Bank, said there is no scope for cloning EMV or chip-based cards as the fraud would be detectable. He said most of the banks in Bangladesh have already introduced EMV cards, but some banks were yet to do it.
“Still many countries in the world use magnetic strip cards, which is vulnerable to frauds,” said Shirin.
If fraudsters use a cloned card for buying goods and services or cash withdrawal, mobile message would be sent to the original owner. But foreigners without a roaming phone would not get the message, he added.
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