Hanoi police are looking further into a case in which four Chinese men were captured for using fake credit cards to appropriate money from others by paying for made-up taxi trips via Point of Sale devices in local cabs.

>> Two Chinese detained for faking int’l credit cards>> Bulgarian caught withdrawing money with fake ATM card These Chinese nationals have their names transcribed in Vietnamese as Phuong Quang Thuan, 31, Du Chi Hung, 25, Lam Bang, 39, and Tran Sach Kien, 36. All of them have been charged with appropriating property after they were discovered faking credit cards with the information of the cardholders they had bought from hackers. The four were arrested on April 22 while using a fake card to pay bogus taxi fares through a Point of Sale (POS) device of a bank installed inside a cab in Hanoi.   POS is a kind of equipment via which a customer can use a credit card issued by a bank to make a payment to the merchant in exchange for goods or services. Anti-hi tech crime police in the capital’s Thanh Tri District had been tipped off that a group of Chinese nationals were colluding with a number of taxi drivers to appropriate money from bank cardholders by using POS devices. Specifically, these Chinese men did not take any taxi trips but they asked the taxi drivers of three firms – Group, Hanoi, and CP – to allow them to pay for sham rides with their counterfeit cards by means of the POS devices in the drivers’ cars.  According to investigators, the foreigners and taxi drivers entered into an agreement whereby the latter pay the former in cash equal to the amount of money charged through the POS devices, and then the former would return a commission commensurate with the charge. On searching their rooms at two hotels in Ba Dinh District, police seized a laptop, a piece of equipment for loading data into credit cards, a machine used to stamp patterns on credit cards, a POS device, and 109 credit cards of different types. Police said these foreigners had bought the personal information of real cardholders from hackers to counterfeit their credit cards. According to an initial investigation, from April 16 this year until their arrest, the Chinese made at least 95 payments through POS devices, of which 57 was successful, stealing a total amount of VND54 million (US$2,560).  The capital city police are expanding their investigation into this fraud.

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