'Badmaash company' dupes banks of Rs 1.5 crore through 'credit' cards

JAIPUR: Akin to Shahid Kapoor-starrer Badmaash Company, where four youths go on to spin plots to dupe people all over the globe and mint millions, this rogue company, comprising three fraudsters, imported the modus operandi of international cyber criminals to the city's doorstep and duped half-a-dozen banks of% Rs 1.50 crore.
They cloned credit cards after buying stolen card data from overseas cyber criminals through an online money transfer website and used these master/visa cards to make payments to their fake current accounts through phoney purchases at their office.
The banks realised that the money they had loaned to fake card holders had ended up in the fake bank accounts of these criminals, following which an FIR was registered.
The trio registered a firm with an address at Crystal Palm in the city and used fake ID cards to open current accounts with various banks, police said.
The accused were identified as Bhagwat Singh Rajpurohit, Afsar Rehman and Khalid Khan.
Bhagwat Singh hails from Pali district, but was recently living in Mumbai.
Khalid is from Jaipur's MI Road area, while Afsar is from Karnataka.
It took the cyber police nearly eight months to decode the case. In a major breakthrough, the cyber police on Saturday arrested these three men.
Cyber police station DSP Rajendra Sharma said that in 2012, Bhagwat Singh worked at a garment shop in Bengaluru where he came in contact with Afsar. Afsar used to provide credit cards to Bhagwat Singh for swiping them in the point of sale (POS) machine.
"The machine is used at retail outlets. Customers can swipe their credit cards to make payments. Bhagwat Singh used to get 20% of the transaction amount he made for Afsar. They developed friendship. One Rajesh Sharma also joined their gang. Together, they planned a big cyber fraud through card cloning," said Rajendra Sharma.
The officer said that as per the plan, Rajesh rented a house owned by one Vikas Mehta in the city's Sachivalya Nagar in 2013. Bhagwat Singh used electricity bills and other documents to prepare fake driving licence and other IDs in the name of Vikas Mehta. These IDs were used to open current accounts with various banks in the city in the name of a phoney firm - India Art Gallery - for which they rented an office on the second floor of Crystal Palm in the city. Bhagwat Singh also had Khalid join the gang in Jaipur," said the officer.
The gang members then applied to various banks for installing POS machines in their office. They used an online currency transfer website - PerfectMoney.com - to get credit card data from cyber criminals based in the USA, Europe, Russia and other countries.
PerfectMoney.com allows customers to transfer 'Perfect Money' (an online currency unit which has an exchange rate against dollars and Euros) to one another. The Perfect Money currency units can be sent to other people via email, or redeemed at exchange services.
"The gang paid Perfect Money to overseas cyber criminals to buy stolen card data on an online forum.
The data has 37-digit magnetic strip details also. These digits transfer a customer's card details to magnetic strips which were used to clone credit cards by the gang members," said the officer.
The officer added that the gang members swiped the cloned cards on the POS machines installed in their office. "Assuming that a customer has purchased some item at their office through a credit card, the banks would transfer the money to the gang members' current accounts," said the officer.
The Bank of Baroda was duped of Rs 53 lakh, Allahabad Bank of Rs 65 lakh, SBI of Rs 4 lakh, ICICI Bank of Rs 5 lakh and Central Bank of India of Rs 22 lakh.
The three accused were arrested from Bengaluru and Jaipur. The police have seized seven POS machines from their possession.