Three people have been sentenced in Beijing's Tongzhou Court for a credit card fraud that netted them 540,000 yuan, according to Beijing News.
Xu Chunjiao, a nightclub manager who initiated the fraud, was sentenced to 12 years and fined 100,000 yuan.
Ji Weidong, a former employee at a State-owned bank, was sent to jail for 11 and a half years. Ji's cousin, Yin Pengfei, was ordered to serve eight years. Ji and Yin were also fined 90,000 yuan and 60,000 yuan respectively, Beijing News reported.
The court was told Xu was eager to profit from handling customers' credit cards and applied for a point of sale (POS) machine in late 2008.
At the time, Ji was in charge of the approval of POS machines with the bank he worked at and, with the promise of money from Xu and two fake IDs, Ji obtained two POS machines and instructed his cousin to set up a fake company.
The court even heard that Ji told his cousin how to pass the bank verification for POS machines.
"You'd better stay with the telephone connected with the POS machine around the clock and make sure whenever the bank calls, the call is answered," Ji said in an interview with Mirror Evening News.
Yin told the newspaper: "My cousin told me his friend Xu could get foreign bank cards but had no POS machines to cash out. That is why we cooperated."
Xu also got several foreign credit cards from a Singapore group that made fake bank cards. The group claimed back 60 percent of the cash earned from the cards.
After carrying out 272 transactions valued at more than 540,000 yuan, Ji and his cousin each took a cut of about 50,000 yuan before the bank detected the abnormal transactions and reported the abuse to police, according to Beijing Times.
"I never thought I would be arrested because cashing out using credit cards from foreign banks has a very low risk," Ji told Mirror Evening News. "The bank never reported a case like this in my 19 years of work."
The newspaper quoted an unnamed insider as saying fraud artists with the necessary fake documentation have no trouble getting POS machines and banks are usually too busy to notice such illegal transactions.
"The banks encourage transactions with bank cards because each time they charge a fee of 0.5 percent to 3 percent of the transaction amount, even for the fake card transactions. That is why the bank usually does not report fake cards to police," the insider said.
The insider said that domestic banks that do find fake bankcards usually freeze the card accounts for a while but, if foreign banks do not claim the money back, the domestic bank will unfreeze them.
The newspaper said genuine cardholders ripped off by such fraudsters are usually compensated by insurance companies and rarely report the matter to police.
A judicial interpretation published late last year said POS machine operators who pay cash to cardholders on fake transactions stand to be sentenced to the crime of illegal business operation.
