Three members of a gang which bought petrol stations and bribed insiders as part of a Coventry-based £254,000 credit card scam have been jailed.
Many drivers who filled up at one of the garages they controlled were secretly filmed by ceiling cameras keying in their pin numbers to pay their bills. Their credit and debit cards were then cloned and used in transactions around the world.
London's Southwark Crown Court heard when police raided a house in Winsford Avenue, Coventry, they found a state of the art "cloning factory for compromised cards".
Chris Coltart, prosecuting, said it contained 4,500 blank white cards, complete with magnetic strips. Some even had pin numbers written on them and ready to be flown abroad.
Also seized was a "wealth" of expensive equipment, including card readers, laptop computers, and memory sticks containing details of hundreds of "compromised" accounts. There was even a BP name badge .
Among those arrested was 28-year-old British national Ariyakunathasa Pirathesan, who lived at the "veritable fraud factory" and was described by Judge Martin Beddoe as a "very principal player" in the conspiracy.
Further inquiries led to a Leicester warehouse he had rented, which contained more equipment and extensive "footage from covert cameras of pin numbers being inputted into pads".
He was jailed for four-and-a-half-years.
Also detained were two illegal immigrants. Sri Lankan Sombalu Jeyaganesh, 34, of Allan Drive, Raynhill, Liverpool, helped emboss the cloned cards. In addition, a "commercial valuation" found for a petrol station in Bootle, Merseyside, was found in a bedroom he was using at the Coventry address.
The third man to be arrested was Sivanesan Mayilvaganam, of Garden Avenue, Mitcham, Surrey, 28, who was also recruited to help "process" the fake cards.
They each got three years and were recommended for deportation.
All three admitted one count of conspiring to defraud clearing banks between January 1, 2007, and March 13 this year.
Passing sentence, the judge told them: "This was a massive, very determined, well-organised and sophisticated operation. This particular form of credit card fraud is becoming widespread.
"It is a real and significant scourge on the banking industry and the holders of their credit cards. Financial damage caused by this activity is substantial, and it was substantial in this case.
"The need for substantial deterrent sentences in cases such as this is obvious," he added.
Mr Coltart told the court although the actual amount stolen- mainly as a result of cash machine withdrawals abroad - was £254,000, the "average loss figures for compromised cards" suggested the fraud could eventually have netted up to £3.5 million.
"The vast majority of credit cards in this case were being used at petrol stations. All of the evidence suggests it was petrol stations used to capture electronic data and physically film customers entering their pin numbers.
"This can be done by fraudsters acquiring petrol stations and running them as legitimate businesses and alternatively bribing staff working there already."
He added: "The international dimension of the fraud is best encapsulated by the passport stamps which indicated between January 2006 and December 2007 Pirathesan made a total of 29 foreign trips to India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the US."
