Student techies use stolen credit card details to buy latest gadgets

Groups of school and college students in Delhi and NCR along with other tier-I cities are on the radar of security agencies for using stolen data from international credit cards to buy the latest gadgets and resell them to their friends at half the cost. 

“While investigating a credit card fraud from a leading online shopping website, we intercepted bulk shopping orders for which payment was done using a credit card belonging to an international bank.

This raised suspicions, and upon further investigation we found there are several techie student groups which are buying or stealing international credit card details and are illegally using it to shop gadgets from online portals,” UP STF’s additional superintendent Triveni Singh told Mail Today. 

The investigating officer claims that these scamsters have become a popular source of the latest gadgets among students.

Young students are their customers. These youngsters provide a list of gadgets like the latest mobiles, cameras, electronic appliances, etc. They buy these products from shopping websites which do not require passwords, an officer said. 

If the gang buys a digital SLR camera for Rs 1 lakh they sell it to their friends only for Rs 40,000-50,000. They have fixed clientele who want branded products at a dirt cheap rate. 

Once the misuse of the card is detected, the gang starts using the data of a new card holder.

“Most of these cards which are found to be misused belong to various international banks from Washington, New Jersey, Ohio in the US. We have also found card details of Australian and European countries. Most of the international debit cards do not require PIN for carrying out transactions. There are many online merchants who do not have facility of OTP (One Time Password) for carrying out online transactions. These loopholes are being misused and transactions are being carried out by leaking details of credit cards,” Singh said. 

Police said these scamsters are active in various pockets of Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Kolkata, and Hyderabad. 

Police also found loopholes in the product delivery system and claim that the gangs never disclose their original address. 

“We have found that they give a random address which is close to their house. When the courier service calls them for delivery they collect it from the street. Such practice should come to an end and retailers must ensure that delivery is made at the address mentioned while shopping,” Singh said. 

Cyber crime experts highlighted that credit card details are easily available on the internet, which can be bought at $2 per data. 

“Banks are losing a huge sum every year due to such fraudulent transactions. There are dozens of underground websites which trade in credit cards details. List of account holders is available at $2 per data. There is no action in such cases as international boundaries restrict investigators. A credit card of New York, used in Noida for buying an iPad, will not excite a cop but such a loss collectively goes into several millions,” cyber crime expert Dhruv Soi of Torrid Networks Limited said.

Photo:Representation