Bengaluru: The three high tech cyber criminals, arrested by the Central Crime Branch (CCB) on Friday, reportedly duped people in foreign countries of more than Rs 100 crore by cloning their credit cards.
The accused gathered credit card credentials of potential victims from the dark web and cloned the credit cards at their flat in Bengaluru.
The prime accused, Diane Thomas (30), a Sri Lankan national and the mastermind of the racket, used his command over electronics to perfection and cloned credit cards that even bank officials found hard to pick out.
The racket was being run from the city for the last three years and had thousands of victims, but not a single complaint was filed against them as all the victims were from foreign countries who did not know where their cards were being used illegally.
Each day, the trio made transaction worth Rs 5-10 lakh and the total amount swindled by them easily crossed Rs 100 crore, the police said.
“The trio caught hold of brokers to identify shops that would replace the original point of sales machines with the tampered ones. The profits were shared on 40-30-30 basis, among the accused, brokers and shopowners,” a police officer, who is part of the investigation, told Deccan Chronicle.
Diane’s gift of the gab also helped as he could speak seven different languages, including Kannada, perfectly and make friends with his potential partners in crime easily.
All credit cards didn't work
The accused first tried their cloned credit cards at the POS machines set up by them.They would make false transactions running up to Rs 30-50,000 at.
While a few transactions would succeed, the amount would be converted into Indian rupees and deposited into the account linked to the POS set up in the shop.
The accused then withdrew the amount and shared it. But majority of the credit cards were blocked right away by original customers after receiving the transaction message.
Each accused had six girlfriends
The three-bedroom flat where the accused stayed had all the luxuries. Each of them had a separate room stacked with loads of narcotic drugs and syringes, condoms and expensive liquor.
Each accused had up to six girlfriends, who visited the flat to do drugs and stay with the accused.
Shockingly, the girls were all well educated and employed with some of the top tech companies in the city.
