Bhubaneswar: The Commissionerate Police Saturday busted a gang involved in financial fraud through credit cards by using forged documents and arrested at least five persons in this connection.
According to Bhubaneswar DCP Prateek Singh, the kingpin of this nexus used to pay patients’ bills at various private hospitals through fraudulently obtained credit cards.
The cops arrested the main accused Biju Tripathy (58) from Puri’s Pipili area, who was found in possession of cash over Rs 7 lakh along with three sacks packed with money receipts. Police also seized 450 credit and debit cards, bank passbooks, chequebooks and six POS machines from the possession of the arrested persons, Singh informed.
The investigation by cops based on a financial fraud complaint uncovered that Tripathy had employed means of forgery to submit the required documents, including Aadhar cards, address proofs, and other details of victims, to obtain the credit cards registered with the victims’ names without their knowledge.
The second leg of the scam involved some billing agents of some private hospitals. The billing agents of numerous hospitals were hand in glove with Tripathy in this racket as they informed the latter to swipe forged credit cards at the time of billing whenever kins of patients came to pay medical bills in cash. Subsequently, Tripathy took the cash from the billing agents and redirected the funds for different purposes by taking advantage of the reimbursement period provided by credit cards (30-45 days), the police alleged.
Later, Tripathy minted profits using the funds and some of it was distributed among the billing agents, while the remaining amount was utilised to settle credit card bills that were issued in the names of multiple victims, police added.
Several individuals involved in the scam were detained, including Prasanjeet Das (28), alias Rinku and Mukesh Mantri, responsible for providing the fraudulently generated credit cards to Tripathy. Abdul Rahmen and Rajesh Das — two billing agents from a private hospital — were also apprehended, police said.
The gang was busted after Rakesh Kumar (35) filed a case December 17 at Cyber Crime And Economic Offence Police Station in Bhubaneswar. Rakesh alleged that a credit card had been issued in his name without his knowledge, leading to unauthorised transactions. He came to know of it when he applied for a loan and found his Cibil score to be poor.
A manhunt is on to arrest other members of this racket.
PNN
