Mumbai Crime: Card cloning scam busted at mall kiosk

Officers from Crime Branch Unit-XII arrested two men on Saturday for cloning credit/debit cards of customers purchasing tickets for Essel World from a kiosk at Inorbit Mall.

The accused were identified as Rahul Vinkar (24) and Sachin Singh (21), employees of the firm to whom the job of selling tickets to the amusement park at the mall was outsourced.

Both Vinkar and Singh were booked under sections 419 (cheating by impersonation), 420 (cheating), 465 (forgery), 467 (forgery of valuable security, will, etc.), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged), 472 (making or possessing counterfeit seal) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code.

They were produced in the court yesterday and are currently in police custody.

Game over
Speaking to mid-day, an officer said they received a tip-off that two members of a card cloning gang, suspected of swindling lakhs of rupees by applying the same method, are stealing data of unsuspected people purchasing Essel World tickets from a kiosk at Inorbit Mall.

A police team then raided the kiosk and arrested Vinkar and Singh. The team also recovered a laptop, a rigged card swipe machine and 14 blank cards from their possession.

Police says
The officer added that the accused would copy the data from credit/debit cards of customers after swiping their cards on the machine installed with a skimmer.

"The stolen data was later transferred onto the blank cards. The accused would withdraw money from the accounts after a few weeks using the PIN they had secured through the rigged Electronic Draft Capture (EDC) device aka card swipe machine," the officer said.

Cops said other members of this gang are wanted for committing similar frauds across Mumbai. They added that the Essel World management was unaware of this scam.