Credit card cheaters who duped people of several lakhs of rupees had used electronic data capture (EDC) machines issued by three private banks, police has revealed.

Police arrested four people, viz. Dheeraj Khanna, Yogesh Mahajan, Mohammed Yasin and Pankaj Deewan in connection with the credit card fraud; while three of their partners, viz. Rahul, Kamal and Devender Chauhan are still at large.

DCP (Special Cell) Sanjeev Yadav said that three of the arrested four people used to arrange for cloned cards and Dheeraj had procured the swipe machines. Dheeraj had procured the machines under a false name of Rohit Kumar.

Making the revelations about the fraud, Yadav said, "The bank had installed EDC machines to facilitate the payment by credit and debit cards through their bank network at the establishments owned by one Rohit Kumar."

A total of thirteen electronic card reader machines have been recovered by the police.

The DCP also said that the gang had also hired a professional hacker to clone credit cards. They also used an imported `skimmer' to copy information of a credit/debit card. The information captured on the skimmer would later be copied on a magnetic strip-equipped plain card. Then the cloned cards were swiped on a reader machine. A customer's money was then transferred to the bank account of one of the members of the gang and withdrawn later.

As per available information, the cheaters made illegal transactions to the tune of Rs. 9.75 lakhs.