Five-member gang arrested for stealing data, cloning credit cards

MUMBAI: The Mumbai crime branch recently arrested a gang of five people, including a woman who works in an event management company, for allegedly cloning a credit

MUMBAI: The Mumbai crime branch recently arrested a gang of five people, including a woman who works in an event management company, for allegedly cloning a credit card of an American national and also of many other people.

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The accused used to purchase stolen data from original credit cards of US nationals through a Nigerian and later prepare bogus credit cards using the original data. They also used to steal credit card data of Indians. The accused used to withdraw cash from ATM machines and also used the cloned cards for shopping in Mumbai and other states.

The arrested accused were identified as Nikita Jethwa, Sachin Singh, Rahul Vinkar, Chirag Wadhwana and Pawan Tiwari. Nikita, Sachin and Rahul worked with an event management firm,for a famous amusement park near Mumbai. Chirag works independently and Pawan worked as a freelancer. Pawan was arrested from Allahabad last week and he is now in police custody.

Chirag and Pawan are said to be the masterminds and are involved in various card cloning scams for the past five years.

During investigations, police learnt that Chirag was in touch with several Nigerian nationals and purchased stolen credit card data of American card holders. One of the Nigerians used to send data through an app to Chirag, who used to pass it to Pawan for preparing a cloned credit card, said a police officer.

The accused used to steal data of several people who used to visit the famous amusement park near Mumbai. “Nikita works on the cash counter and used to note the pin numbers of the customers during transactions,” said a police officer.

“We have recovered five machines which were used for card cloning, two laptops and an electronic draft capture machine (also known as credit/ debit card swipe machine), several blank credit cards and many silver hallmarks from Pawan,” said police inspector Mahesh Nivatkar of Unit 12. “We have found several other evidences from the accused,” he added.