Hyderabad: A techie-turned- fraudster from Tamil Nadu, who learnt cloning of international credit cards and purchased a cloning equipment from the darknet, was arrested by the Rachakonda police on Friday for cheating foreign nationals. The police arrested his four associates, who had cheated victims to a tune of Rs 30 lakh. The suspects were identified as Ayyappan, the kingpin in the racket, and his associates Padiga Raghavendra, Pallecherla Vamshi Krishna alias Akhil, Challa Bhaskar Rao, hailing from AP and Sidhula Bhaskar, a resident of Nalgonda district.
Mahesh Bhagwat, Rachakonda commissioner, said that they have seized the equipment used for cloning along with the 16 PoS machines, 16 cloned cards and Rs 2 lakh from them. The accused was tech-savvy and knew how to operate the darknet. Using this, he had purchased data of credit card holders belonging to the US, UK and Australia from the darknet, the police said.
Ayyappan, who was working as a commission agent, could not make much money. Later, he became a member of the ICQ app which is an instant messaging app from where he developed friendship and joined various groups and learnt the knowledge of cloning credit cards and procured the cloning device (MSR606) from a e-commerce website which he accessed through the darknet. Meanwhile, he also developed friendship with Raghavendra and Vamshi Krishna through social networking sites.
