By Gurmukh Singh, IANS
Toronto : Imagine someone being deported eight times but still managing to sneak back into Canada. A 39-year-old Nigerian national is in police net here for not only coming illegally but also duping Canadians to the tune of $10 million.
An undisclosed number of fake passports, credit cards, chequebooks, social security and health cards, and driver’s licences have been seized from him.
Edmund Ezemo would defraud people by setting up fake companies for which he bought goods on fake but certified cheques.
Those goods were then quickly sent abroad, leaving the suppliers little time to know that they have been duped.
In the past, the police have smashed many credit card fraud gangs.
Three years ago, a Tamil gang was cracked for duping hundreds of people by using a debit machine that was stolen from a mall and used in cheating customers at a restaurant.
Using this debit machine, the gang would capture credit card information, PINs and debit numbers from the clients. With this stolen data, they would prepare fake cards and then steal people’s money.
The gang was found linked to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, and it was smashed after the police arrested 13 LTTE sympathizers who were allegedly trying to procure arms for the Tigers.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) warns on its website that payment card counterfeiters now use the latest devices such as embossers, encoders, and decoders often supported by computers to read, modify, and implant magnetic stripe information on counterfeit cards.
Phoney identification has been used to obtain government assistance, personal loans, unemployment benefits, defrauding government agencies, individuals, and corporate bodies, it adds.
Counterfeit credit cards, it says, represent the largest category of credit card fraud.
Organized criminals have acquired the technology that allows them to ‘skim’ the data contained on magnetic stripes, manufacture phoney cards, and overcome such protective features as holograms, it warns.