Saturday, May 17, 2008

3 held for buying tickets with trader’s card - TOI 17 May 2008

Mumbai: Subhash Bhurat, a businessman from Hyderabad, was stunned when he recently received multiple text messages, informing him of the online purchase of four air tickets that he had never bought. After his relative in the city lodged an FIR, the airport police on Thursday arrested three persons, including a woman, for booking their air tickets on a low-cost airline using details of Bhurat’s credit card. The accused—Iftekhar Qureshi, Aashi Singh and Munir Yusuf Norge—have been remanded in police custody till Saturday by a local court. Singh and Qureshi were travelling to Delhi by the low-cost airline when the police nabbed them. “I was travelling from Mumbai to Hyderabad on May 13 when I received a text message stating that my ICICI credit card details had been used to book a Leh-Delhi air ticket costing Rs 4,774’’ Bhurat told TOI. The same night, he received another text message about a Mumbai-Mangalore air ticket, worth Rs 5,149, being booked through his credit card. “Then on Thursday afternoon, there was a third text message about a Mumbai-Delhi air ticket being booked with my credit card. It costed Rs 7,498. I was shocked,’’ the businessman said. Bhurat suspected that someone had got the details of his credit card while he was on his way to Hyderabad from the Mumbai airport on May 13. “I was asked to produce my ident i f i c at i o n - proof at the airline counter when I displayed my credit card. Only a few hours later, I started getting text messages on my cellphone, informing me about the purchases I had never made,’’ he added. Soon after, Bhurat spoke to his brother-in-law, who stays in Mumbai, and got a complaint lodged, following which, the police tried to get hold of the last two people who had booked air tickets using Bhurat’s credit card details. “This was because the earlier two tickets had been booked at least two days ago,’’ said senior inspector Somnath Ghuge. The police first contacted the airline on which the two passengers had booked their tickets for Delhi and the two were identified as Singh and Qureshi, both residents of Agra. The police simply announced their names at the airport and summoned them over. The duo claimed that an agent, Munir Norge, had booked the tickets for them. The three were later arrested for cheating under Sections 420, 34 of Indian Penal Code. “On interrogations, Norge, a resident of Null Bazaar, told us that the tickets had been booked by another person named Sameer Khan. We are probing the case further,’’ Ghuge added.

Richa Pinto & Nitasha Natu I TNN

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