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British Indian jailed for credit card fraud

LONDON: A British Indian computer expert has been jailed for six years for his involvement in what is believed to be one of Britain’s biggest credit card frauds in recent times.

Anup Patel (30), dubbed the “mastermind” of the scam, stole some £2 million by making bogus cards which were then “exported.”

A former student of London University, Patel ran what the police described as an “industrial-scale factory” where bogus cards were made using customers’ details stolen from petrol stations and shopping centres by hacking into their payment terminals.

The fake cards were sent through special “couriers” to other countries. One such “courier,” Anthony Thomas (45), has been jailed for two years.

Prosecution told the jury at the Croydon Crown Court that both men had previous criminal record. Patel was jailed for two years for a credit card fraud in France 10 years ago, and Thomas had 65 previous convictions. During investigation, the police found they had links with criminal gangs in other countries, including Thailand and Turkey.

The police claimed that they seized thousands of magnetic strips, blank plastic cards and fake payment terminals when they raided Patel’s offices in Croydon, a south London suburb, in 2006.

They also found details of 19,000 cards that were used to clone fake ones.

According to The Times, Patel developed a “state-of-the-art technology secretly to harvest customers’ private bank details” when he was studying computer sciences at London University. The newspaper said he was so confident that he had developed a fool-proof technology that he once dared a police officer to “catch me if you can”— alluding to the Hollywood film Catch Me If you Can in which an FBI agent pursues an elusive con artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

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