Hyderabad police busts major credit card scam in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: Hyderabad  cops on thursday busted a major fraud team, in which one person floated a fictitious company with fake employees, procured credit cards in their names and swindled four banks of over Rs 1.5 crore. Ten persons, including the kingpin, were arrested.

According to City Police Commissioner VV Srinivasa Rao, the North Zone Task Force had arrested persons, including contract employees of GHMC and the banks, who helped the key suspect, K Ranga Reddy of Turkayamjal, pull off the fraud. The police recovered Rs 6.9 lakh and 125 credit cards, he said.

The others who were arrested were Ranga Reddy’s business partner T Vinay Kumar Reddy; M Santosh Reddy, an Internet café owner; V Srikanth and M Naresh, both GHMC contract employees; G Kishore Babu and G Sailesh Kumar, both contract employees of HDFC Bank; R Sandeep Kumar and U Anand, both SBI employees, and M Paramesh Kumar.

The police said Ranga Reddy, a native of Devarakonda, migrated to Hyderabad in 1998 and had a computer hardware shop in Karmanghat. Later, he floated Parnika Nano Systems Private Limited, named after his daughter, and got registered it with the Registrar of Companies in 2013. He showed himself as the director with the business profile shown as ‘Computer Data Processing’.

“He developed an employee database with fake house



addresses and birth certificates with the help of Santosh Reddy for a commission of Rs 2,000,” the Commissioner said.

With these forged documents, Srikanth and Naresh, attached to the GHMC Election cell in LB Nagar, procured 48 voter ID cards, using which PAN cards were secured for the 48 fictitious employees.

“Using these, Ranga Reddy and Vinay Kumar managed Kishore Babu, an HDFC bank employee to open salary accounts at the Santosh Nagar branch for the 48 ’employees’ and applied for credit cards. Verification agent Sailesh Kumar too was managed,” the Commissioner said.

Using the 48 credit cards, from October 2013 to February 2015, they siphoned off Rs 45.7 lakh from HDFC. Using the same modus operandi, Ranga Reddy cheated the SBI branch in Begumpet and with the help of Anand Rao and Sandeep Kumar, procured 33 more credit cards and siphoned off Rs 25.2 lakh.

Likewise, 42 credit cards from Standard Chartered Bank and three cards from the Ratnakar Bank Limited were taken and Rs 90 lakh was swindled. Ranga Reddy also managed to procure credit cards in the names of tea vendors and hawkers, using forged documents. All the cards were used to their maximum limit, the police said.

The fraud came to light during audits by the banks, whose recovery procedures could recover only Rs 6 lakh.