India arrests three Lankans, including man wanted by Interpol

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The Chennai police on Friday arrested three men in connection with a credit card scam. One of the arrested men is wanted by Interpol as the Sri Lankan police have issued a red corner notice against him.


Based on the confession of Sivanesan alias Prem, a Sri Lankan Tamil, arrested by Central Crime Branch (CCB) sleuths a few days ago for allegedly using a skimmer to steal data from credit card users in the city, police teams led by CCB deputy commissioner of police S Jayakumar and assistant commissioner of police, bank fraud wing, Jaya Singh, arrested the trio from a house at Ramavaram here. They recovered three laptops, two encoding machines, mobile phones and 15 fake credit cards from the house.

Police identified the trio as Jayatharan Thambapillai, 28, a native of Trincomallee in Sri Lanka, and his associates V Navaneetha Raja, 37, and V Prateep Kumar, 28, both hailing from Sri Lanka.

Jayatharan told the police that he arrived in Tamil Nadu in August last year on an illegal ferry. Later, he contacted Navaneetha Raja and Prateep Kumar and stayed with them at Ramavaram and operated the racket.

Police said Jayatharan, a graduate in civil engineering, developed knowledge in computer and collected stolen credit card data from hackers. He was also regularly in touch with the hackers and exchanged information.

Preliminary inquiries revealed that Jayatharan was involved in several credit card scams in Sri Lanka. As he managed to evade police apprehension and stayed in hideout, the Sri Lankan police issued a red corner notice through Interpol in 2011.