Six men have this week been jailed and a further two given suspended sentences for their roles in a large scale credit card scam that hit retailers for an estimated £2million. The men, all from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, who targeted more than 2,000 businesses, each pleaded guilty to conspiracy and defraud and were jailed for a total of more than 16 years.
This was a full time operation for the six men who felt they had unearthed a goldmine in the scam and were showing no signs of stopping up until they were caught. The scam relied on the use of stolen credit card details acquired over the internet’s ‘black market’ in order to defraud businesses. The scammers would take the details and clone the credit cards using a counterfeiting machine before racking up huge bills on alcohol, cars and electrical appliances.
Then when unsuspecting victims of the card fraud would notice the suspicious transactions and missing money, the card owners would cancel the transaction leaving the retailer without the funds owed or goods. The retailers would only realise this weeks after the purchases and refunds had taken place.
The scam was brought to an end when the police caught two of the individuals in the act and were able to unearth a huge volume of evidence including the counterfeiting machine and the fraudulently taken goods, £600,000 worth of goods are accounted for at this stage but police believe this is only a small amount of the overall sum taken.
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