Mumbai: Amid concerns over rising credit card fraud cases across the country, the Mumbai police has unearthed a massive Rs 13.5 crore online air ticket scam, sending shockwaves among credit card users across the country.
According to Mumbai police sources, the Economic Offences Wing of its crime branch on Wednesday busted the Rs 13.5-crore credit card racket that cheated Kingfisher Airlines by fraudulently booking more than 15,000 tickets on the Internet using credit card numbers. The police have arrested one person, Ahmed Sheikh, in this connection.
The police claim the gang had floated a travel agency, called KGN Aviation, and used to book airline tickets online using credit card numbers obtained from hotels, shopping malls, restaurants and other retail outlets.
The scam came to light after the airlines lodged a complaint with the EOW December 21 last year, regarding the massive scale on which online tickets were being booked fraudulently. Most of the credit cards used for the transactions were from the ICICI Bank.
"Consumers, whose credit card numbers the gang had got hold of, were stunned after receiving bills of transactions which they never made. As a result, they began complaining to the bank. The complaints swelled between July and November last year," news agency IANS quoted a senior EOW official as saying.
"Suspecting fraud, the bank asked the customers not to pay the money they had not actually spent on the tickets and instead charged the amount of Rs 135 million back to Kingfisher Airlines."
"It was then that the airlines lodged a complaint with us, saying 15,255 tickets were fraudulently booked through the net and in each case the gang had used a different credit card number," the EOW official told IANS.
"After receiving complaints from Kingfisher Airlines, we began our investigations and stumbled upon KGN Aviation. The gang had intercepted details of all the 15,225 credit cards from accomplices in various hotels, restaurants, malls and retails outlets," he said.
"They knew the credit card numbers, expiry dates and customer verification value (CVV) numbers — the additional three digits printed on the signature strip on the back of the card," the official said.
"The modus operandi of the gang was to log on to the websites of leading private airlines that issued email confirmations of bookings. The gang used the details to book tickets online and take printouts of the email confirmations which could be exchanged with boarding passes or tickets," he added.
The members of the gang would then hang around at international air transport association (IATA) offices, restaurants and bars and befriend frequent as well as first time flyers, by offering them tickets at a much cheaper rate than offered by travel agents, the official said.
"Though, we have arrested Sheikh, we are on the lookout for Sameer Kasam Sheikh, the mastermind of the scam, and also trying to locate the computers from which the gang operated. Several cyber cafes are also under the scanner, from where the gang is believed to have operated. More arrests are likely to be made soon," he said.
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