29 suspects nailed in credit card fraud
The suspects are caught from different parts of the country and taken to Shanghai.
A total of 29 suspects have been caught in a telecom fraud case involving credit card users, Shanghai police said on Sunday.
Over 300 credit card users from all over the country fell victim to the fraud and lost over 2 million yuan (US$300,000) to the fraudsters, police said.
Police in Huangpu District said they started their investigation in June after receiving a report from the credit card center of the Bank of Communications that a good number of its credit card users were defrauded and suffered loss from October 2017 to June this year.
The suspects, who illegally acquired personal data of credit card users, sent SMS messages as if from the Bank of Communications to them claiming that their cards had been frozen because they missed the due date to pay the bill, police said.
When the victims called the mobile phone number in the messages, the fraudsters asked for their credit card information and registered them without their notice in an app of the Bank of Communications which enables mobile payments through a service like Alipay.
Those registered accounts were then used to pay through POS machines and later cashed out, police said.
The suspects were caught in Hainan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Sichuan and Zhejiang provinces.
During the raid, police said they seized 30 POS machines, 120 bank cards, 10 computers and 49 mobile phones which were considered to be related to the case.
All of the suspects are now under detention, police said.
