Police arrest trio for credit card scam

Youngsters con credit card holders of over Rs50 lakhs

Saraswati Ramdas Sommaiya aka Chinki, 28, along with two accomplices, Harishankar Dube, 26, and Prakash Anand Waghmare, 24, were arrested by officials of the Mahim police station and were charged of conning Srinivas Thevar of Rs1,38,513.

The police also recovered 10 other credit cards, belonging to various people, from them. They estimate the trio netted more than Rs50 lakh.

“Thevar lodged a complaint about his credit card being misused on October 11. The modus operandi  employed by the trio was to approach people at banks, asking them details about their credit limit and offering to increase the same for a small fee. They would then take the card, promise to update it and return it later,” said Joe Gaikwad, senior police inspector, Mahim police station.

“The accused would then deposit bogus cheques for large amounts into the credit account of the card-holder. Even before the cheque had been honoured, they used the card to make huge purchases. We suspect the active connivance of certain bank employees in the scam when the bogus cheques were immediately credited to the account. We are questioning some of them right now,” Gaikwad told DNA.

He added that a bogus cheque of Rs1,20,000 was put into the account of Thevar, immediately raising suspicion about the involvement of bank employees.

“We have also recovered the pay slip used by the accused to deposit the dud cheque,” he said. The trio won the confidence of storeowners from whom they collected large amounts of money.

“The accused have made purchases worth Rs40,000 from a footwear store, as well as close to a lakh from Samira Dresses. No actual purchases were made by the accused, who simply asked the storeowners to swipe the card and hand over the cash after deducting a percentage for themselves,” Gaikwad said.

The trio relied on the fact that the complainant, whose credit card was returned to him the next day, would only learn about the transactions on his account 15 to 20 days later, when he receives his credit card statement.
The 9th Court in Bandra has remanded the trio to police custody till October 18.