Lankan national held for credit card fraud: BCom graduate turned as fraud

Asian Tribune – Sathyalaya Ramakrishnan reporting from Chennai

The Chennai City Police on Wednesday arrested a 30 year old Sri Lankan national involved in a string of credit card frauds across the southern states.

One Sanjay Kanth hailing from Sri Lanka was picked up by sleuths of the Central Crime Branch(CCB) of the Chennai City Police at a shop on Pantheon Road, in Egmore , where he was trying to purchase a laptop and computer peripherals.

According to CCB officials, Sanjay is a B.Com graduate who was staying in a rented house in Alapakkam. On Wednesday afternoon, he went to a shop in Egmore to purchase a laptop and other accessories. When the three credit cards he gave in succession did not work, the shop owner grew suspicious and informed his bank.

The bank’s risk manager informed the CCB, sleuths came to the store and nabbed Sanjay. Police then raided Sanjay’s house and seized a laptop, pen drive, credit card encoding machine, 177 credit cards and Rs 1.63 lakh Indian currency, among other things.

“This person ran a fake credit card unit at home. He got details of bank accounts of people living abroad through his friends,’ said a police officer.

“He encoded the same using the machine in his house, and would then use the fake card to withdraw money from ATMs in Chennai”, the official added.

Sanjay has made purchases in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and is said to have been involved in credit card fraud since 2001.

This is not the first instance of a Sri Lankan being arrested for credit card fraud. On December 24, 2009, CCB sleuths nabbed Vijay Kanth (29), another Sri Lankan national, for possessing fake credit cards and indulging in illegal business for seven months.

-Asian Tribune –

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