Journalism of Courage
A 30-year-old mason has been arrested by the cyber cell of south district police for allegedly duping Rs 15 lakh in the last six months from American Express, a multinational financial services company, after procuring four credit cards from them on fake identity cards.
DCP (south) Atul Kumar Thakur said the accused has been identified as Shakeel Alam, a class-10 dropout, and his second wife taught him about using credit cards. He was working as a mason for for several leading proprietorship firms for three years. “Shakeel was arrested after we received a complaint from the American Express company, alleging that four credit cards were issued by the accused on fake identity cards through online application. He spent Rs 15.39 lakh through these credit cards and forged cheques, submitted for the payment of bills, which got bounced. He would get cash after swiping credit cards from petrol pumps to hide the trail of money,” he said.
Thakur said Shakeel was absconding after he got to know a complaint was filed against him and applied for anticipatory bail. His application for anticipatory bail was rejected recently and he was arrested with the help of technical surveillance. “During the investigation, we found that he has more than seven bank accounts connected with each other to rotate the amount in those accounts to improve the CIBIL — TransUnion CIBIL Limited, an Indian company that has access to credit information,” said Thakur.
“This information refers to all financial transactions where you have borrowed or repaid the money, the score of his family members and employees and then to seek more loans from the bank. He recently bought an MG Hector car for Rs 21 lakh out of which Rs 19.5 lakh was loan due to good CIBIL score,” Thakur added.
Explaining his modus-operandi, Thakur said, he used to collect the identification documents of unknown people through the internet and after editing, he was using their identification documents to get credit cards issued through online applications. “He took houses on rent in affluent colonies for a month after submitting fake IDs and was using the same new address for getting the credit card issued. His relatives also stayed with him and he left the flat after receiving the delivery of credit card,” he said.
Thakur further states, “The accused opened all the bank accounts through fake identification documents of unknown persons and was giving cheques of such accounts for payments of credit card bills. He had several firms showing his family members and friends as his employees. He was showing that he was making good salary payments to them every month and the same accounts were used to be rotated showing fake transactions in the account. Based on a good CIBIL score due to a good salary, he easily got loans,” he added.
