Next time, don’t just pay up your mobile phone bill without checking the credentials of the collection agent. For, some impostors are on the loose in the city. Their modus operandi is brutally novel: an impersonator collects money from a mobile subscriber and pays up his bill through somebody else’s credit card.
How would some conman know your credit card number? That’s where the police suspect the involvement of certain bank employees.
Following the arrest of two such impostors, the New Delhi police is pursuing the case to find out how deep is the conspiracy.
The racket, suspected to be running for quite some time across the city, came to light after Suresh Gupta, a Paschim Vihar resident, discovered that his Citibank credit card had been used for paying cellphone bills. Whose bills? Gupta had no idea.
The New Delhi district police looked into the credit card payments and the mobile phone numbers, whose bills were paid through the card.
Investigators suspected the hand of a conman since the bills — for an AirTel post-paid connection — had been paid by the customer through an agent. Last night, the police nabbed Parminder, a Krishna Nagar resident, and his associate Deepak Sharma on charges of duping people by posing as cellphone bill payment agents.
The duo allegedly used to collect money from customers of various cellphone service providers and pay off the bills by mentioning the credit card numbers of genuine card holders.
Two things made the conmen’s job easy: an unsuspecting customer entrusts them with the money meant for a bill without checking how the payment has been made.
Secondly, cellphone service providers accept payment through credit cards using the ‘‘non-swiping method’’, that is, by merely writing down the credit card number.
In that case, it is not necessary to produce the card, the police said. Two more alleged conmen, Amit Suri and Sanju, were involved in the racket. Both are absconding.
Suri’s role is interesting, police officials said, as he allegedly obtains the names and confidential credit card numbers of Citibank customers through his contacts in the bank. Suri’s arrest was vital to nail his informers.
Parminder is a veteran conman. He has three cases of cheating against him at Anand Vihar, Preet Vihar and Krishna Nagar, officials said.
The exact extent of the credit card-mobile phone bill payment fraud is yet to be determined.