VISAKHAPATNAM: The City Task Force police with the support of Cybercrime wing officials, arrested a Bulgarian national, who withdrew Rs13 lakh by using cloned Master and Visa cards of foreign banks. The police seized Rs13.03 lakh cash along with the equipment used for committing the fraud from the possession of the accused.
City assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Mahendra Mathe gave details to the media on cracking of the case here on Saturday. According to police, the City Task Force team, led by the ACP, came to know that a foreign national was frequenting to ATM centres in a suspicious manner and was put up in Dolphin Hotel and cloning ATM cards in his room.
The police said Cybercrime Circle Inspector V Gopinath along with his team raided his room and apprehended the accused identified as Valkanov Miroslav Andreanov and filed a case under Sections 65, 66 C & D of the IT Act. During interrogation, Andreanov confessed to the crime.
The accused said he worked as a barman and his friend took him to an unknown person, who said that they would arrange his travel to Kolkata where he will receive one laptop, card cloning machine, Airtel SIM card and empty cards for card cloning. He would also be offered 20 per cent commission on the total money withdrawn from ATMs in India.
As per the plan, he reached Kolkata on January 31 on a travel Visa. After collecting the equipment, including 160 SIM cards, he reached the city on February 3. After putting up in various hotels, he shifted to the Dolphin Hotel on February 19.
During his stay in the city, he used Telegram account with an Indian SIM card and received messages from unknown accounts as links and photos of sendspace.com files, containing credit/debit card numbers of foreigners along with PIN numbers and country’s name. Later, he used the laptop and cloning device and copied the card numbers on blank cards to clone 76 cards.