QUEENS, N.Y. – Police rounded up and charged 38 suspects last week with participation in a credit card ring that bought personal data from source in China to make bogus cards and used the cards to make purchases in the names of thousands of Americans.
The ring tapped into accounts at some two dozen credit unions and banks to steal more than $1 million, authorities said. Among the affected institutions were: Navy FCU, American Airlines FCU, U.S. Senate FCU, Schlumberger Employees CU, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citibank, Chase, US Bank, National City Bank and others, as well as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.
Dubbed by authorities as "House of Cards," the ring used the counterfeit cards to go on shopping sprees all over the county and to buy high-end electronics, jewelry and other luxury items, which were subsequently sold, according to Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, whose office helped break the operation.
"Particularly disturbing is the fact that, in a number of cases, the defendants are charged with using bogus documents to purchase airline tickets and then using those documents as identification to board commercial aircraft," said Brown during a news conference Thursday. "In the hands of terrorists such documents could have easily undermined the efforts of homeland security and other law enforcement officials intent on keeping our borders and citizens safe."
The suspects obtained the account holders’ checking and debit card numbers from a supplier in China which were then used to manufacture forged credit and identification cards. The cards were given to teams of "shoppers" who were sent on shopping expeditions in New York, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere in the U.S. to buy high-end electronics and merchandise, such as flat-screen televisions, laptop computers, designer handbags and jewelry, which were either fenced or sold on the Internet. The merchandise was often resold on a website maintained by the ring at Eastrades.com.
In a variation of the scheme, two members of the ring working with a Queens merchant conducted a "bust out" scam in which large amounts of merchandise were charged to credit card accounts without ever being purchased.
The investigation involved physical surveillance, intelligence gathering and court-authorized wiretapping on dozens of telephones, which required the involvement of Chinese-speaking interpreters in both Cantonese and Mandarin.
Named as the ringleader was Kwok Chow, a 36-year-old Chinese-American national known as Tony, who received the personal credit union and bank account information and oversaw the manufacturing of the phony cards. The un-embossed cards contained the coloring and artwork on the credit unions’ and banks’ genuine cards, and included such security features as holographic images.
Police raided 12 locations last week, 11 in Queens and one in Brooklyn, were they recovered forged credit cards, computers, scanners, printers, templates, card readers and machines used to stamp credit card information onto cards.
