Skimming fraud at Chennai fuel station

Chennai: The fuel station skimming scam, which rocked London in 2007, has now hit bunks in Chennai with the city police arresting a Sri Lankan credit card fraudster and six employees of a petrol bunk in Guindy for allegedly swindling over Rs 15 lakh by stealing the ATM card data of customers. In London, where the skimmers were installed in nearly 200 self-operating pumps, the scam was carried out by Lankan Tamils suspected to have LTTE links.

In Chennai, Lankan national Selvanesan alias Prem, who was arrested for a similar fraud in 2009 and wanted for another case registered in 2011, and his six associates, all employees of a BPCL retail outlet on Anna Salai, were arrested by central crime branch personnel of the city police for allegedly cloning debit and credit cards and swindling money.

“It seems that Prem settled in Mysore and had been paying the employees heavy amounts as commission to carry out the theft of data without the knowledge of the bunk owner. Some employees ‘earned’ up to Rs 65,000 from Prem as commission,” a senior CCB official said.

According to the city police, the gang had stolen digital data from at least 17 customers in the past two months and had been siphoning off Rs 15 lakh in the same period. The gang was busted while pursuing a complaint made to city police by ICCI bank Adyar area manager S. Murali citing that money from the accounts of some of his customers were being withdrawn through ATMs in other cities like Coimbatore, Bengaluru, and Kolkata when their cards were very much in their wallets.

A special team led by CCB deputy commissioner S. Jayakumar picked up fuel station accountant Parthiban who confessed and gave details about the involvement of Prem who had been visiting India on a tourist visa since 2009 and was settled in Mysore.

Prem reportedly approached Parthiban and handed over two ‘skimmers’ with which the other employees, including Shajahan, Vijayakumar, Selvakumar, A.P. Meenatchi and Durai, began capturing data from visibly rich customers by diverting their attention and noting their PINs.

With the help of Parthiban and other accused, a trap was set for Prem who was subsequently picked up from the T. Nagar bus stand on Thursday night. Prem confessed to have committed the crime with the help of the two skimmers he had given to the gang. The police seized two skimmers, two electronic data capture machines, 17 cloned debit/credit cards and five cell phones.