Police bust Credit Card scammers lead by Lankan

The next time you swipe your ATM card to withdraw money, a thin-film device sitting smugly in the card slot may be stealing your data. The next day, your card could be cloned.

Greater Chennai Police on Thursday busted a gang that used slim skimmers stuck to ATMs to steal data, including PIN, and clone cards. The gang withdrew a total of 30 lakh from accounts of scores of people. Leading the gang was B Umesh alias Jatti, a 27-year-old Sri Lankan national who was arrested on similar charges in May 2010. Umesh was on bail.

Other members of the gang were V Divyan, 24, S Rajendran, 49, C Udhya Kumar, 39, and S Jayakumar, 23. Divyan and Rajendran are also Sri Lankan citizens.

Police have recovered more than 30 fake credit and debit cards, besides several equipment including skimmers, encoder machines and laptops. “The gang had got the electronic kit from China through a courier a few years ago,” said A John Rose, assistant commissioner, central crime branch (bank fraud).

The gang would sneak into unguarded ATMs around midnight and attach the skimmers to the card slot. In a couple of days, after several bank customers had used the ATM, they would return to take back the skimmer which had by then copied data of the users’ cards.

“Skimmers, which used to be the size of mobile phones till a few years ago, have become very thin. It takes hardly a few seconds for these men to fix them on ATMs,” said John Rose. The skimmer has a chip, a battery and a sensor that reads the card and copies data to the chip. An encoder machine is used to transfer the data from the skimmer chip to a duplicate card. “A customer is unlikely to notice a skimmer attached to the ATM,” a police officer said.

Since last month, the city police have received 63 complaints from bank customers. The investigation gathered momentum when Greater Chennai Police commissioner J K Tripathy formed special teams following a complaint from Canara Bank, Anna Salai branch, two weeks ago.

Going through CCTV footage from several ATMs, the police teams identified Umesh from a recording made at an ATM in Kilpauk. “The footage shows him fitting something inside the machine,” a police officer said. The police nabbed him at Kovilambakkam on Wednesday night. (TimesofIndia)