Guangdong police bust card fraud gangs

Police have detained two foreign suspects in Guangzhou accused of being part of a gang that produced and used fake bank cards.

Huang Peifu, political commissar of Guangdong provincial public security department's economic crime investigation bureau, said a special task force had been established following reports of two foreigners using fake cards in the city's Liwan district.

In total, 39,900 yuan ($6,130) was withdrawn from ATMs in the area on 20 separate occasions between March 18 to 28, Huang told a news conference in Guangzhou on Wednesday.

Police identified the suspects as Congolese national Mulamba Michel Kabuya, 36, and Chaka Mike, 29, from Zimbabwe, but discovered they had left the mainland.

The pair returned to Guangzhou on April 27 and Kabuya was detained in a hotel room the day afterward. Police seized seven fake bank cards, $4,100 in cash, a computer and other items from the Congolese. Mike was detained in the city's Yuexiu district the same day.

After their detention, the pair confessed to producing more than 80 fake bank cards in Guangzhou using data provided to them by other members of their gang. More than 130,000 yuan is thought to have been stolen using the cards.

"Police are still pursuing another foreigner called Wandjo Alain Mukamba, who is a Congolese that taught Kabuya and Mike how to use this data to produce fake bank cards," Huang said.

In another case, police detained a total of 69 suspects in an operation simultaneously launched in Maoming, Guangzhou and Beijing on the early morning of June 23.

The joint operation busted another card fraud gang, which had been headed by four brothers surnamed Xie from Dianbai county in the western part of Guangdong. Most of the suspected gang members are from the post-1990s generation.

Of the suspects, 32 were detained in Maoming, 20 in Beijing and the remainder in Guangzhou.

Four computers, plus a large number of fake identity cards, bank cards and mobile phones, were seized during the operation.

According to Huang, police also detained a number of other suspects accused of card fraud in Shenzhen, Foshan, Yunfu, Shantou and other Pearl River delta cities as part of a provincewide campaign, code-named Jufeng 2016, that was launched at the start of the year.

"Cases involving bank card crimes have been on the rise in Guangdong, which has issued the largest number of bank cards in the country in recent years," Huang said, urging locals to raise their awareness of such crimes and report any suspicious activity to the police.

A total of 379 suspects, involved in 1,035 cases worth an estimated 120 million yuan, were detained in Guangdong on suspicion of bank card fraud in the first half of this year.

More than 2,100 bank cards, 115 point-of-sale machines and a great deal of related equipment were also seized.

Huang hinted that more special campaigns to fight bank card crime would be launched in the coming months.

According to a clerk from a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Guangzhou's Baiyun district, a growing number of cases involving fake bank cards have been recorded in recent years.

"I hope more concrete and effective measures will be taken to fight against this kind of crime," she said.