Postal staff involved with the gang
If you have been waiting for a credit card in your mail, you cannot be sure that it will reach you. It is because several gangs, operating for more than two decades, in league with postmen and post office employees in the capital, are active in stealing credit cards and charging those on a regular basis.
Members of one such gang, including a postman in the capital, who were arrested by police detectives early this month, revealed how they make money by stealing credit cards.
The postmen, who are the key persons of the ring, do not register in the record book the arrival of parcels that potentially contain credit cards. So there is no proof that the parcels made it to the post office. The postmen then open the parcels and hand the credit cards over to some good-looking members of their gangs.
Using the cards, the fraudsters purchase valuables from posh shopping centres and sell those at lower prices at other shopping malls or to individual buyers.
“So far, I’ve stolen four parcels containing credit cards at the request of gang leader Kamal. I got Tk 40,000 for the job,” Abdur Rouf, the arrested postman of the capital’s Gulshan Post Office, told The Daily Star on December 11 at the Detective Branch Headquarters of the police.
Ring leader Kamal Ahmed alias Nurul Amin was once arrested in 2006 for stealing credit cards. But he came out on bail within a month and resumed the old business, police sources said.
On December 9, the detectives arrested Rouf, Kamal, and Md Russell. Rouf and Kamal are from Barisal while Russell is from Tangail.
In the last three months, police captured at least seven other members of such gangs from in and around the capital.
DB officials said the rackets misappropriated several hundred crores of taka by stealing around 1,500 credit cards in the last 20 years.
Moshiur Rahman, assistant commissioner of DB, said the gang led by Kamal stole at least 1,200 credit cards since 1996 in collusion with some postmen of different city post offices.
“We’ve stolen more than 1,000 credit cards, but we could use only 60 percent of those, the rest we could not use for various reasons,” said Kamal
When asked how did they activate the stolen credit cards, the arrested thieves said not all credit cards require activation, many are pre-activated. Many also come from abroad they added.
Kamal’s 15-member gang has in it five postmen from the city’s Banani, Gulshan, Bashabo, Uttara and Badda post offices.
Talking to this correspondent at the DB office, Rouf said he never thought of getting caught.
“Being a postman for 20 years, it was not difficult for me to detect the parcels that contain credit cards. I never record those in the register,” he said adding that he knew by names some other postmen involved in the gang.
Gang leader Kamal said he got the idea of stealing credit cards from a man named Hamid Akhter, who was his boss and is now in the US.
Another man named Rahman, who was a postman at the General Post Office, was the first to help him in this, he added.
He also gave names of several postmen and other gang members involved in his ring.
Russell said he worked in a private bank till 2008. Then he joined the group. “I mainly do the buying from shopping centres with the credit cards and then sell those.”
Contacted, Mobashwer-ur-Rahman, immediate past director general of the Directorate of Bangladesh Post Office, said during his tenure till September this year, he received a number of complaints about missing credit cards and other parcels.
“I believe some postmen and other employees of some post offices are involved in the illicit activities. We tried in different ways to track them, but failed,” he added.
“Missing parcels tarnishes the image of the state-run postal service,” he noted.
Over the last few days, this paper tried to contact the present DG of the postal department, Nayeb Delwar Hossain, for his comment over the phone, but he did not take the calls.
This correspondent also sent him a text message on December 12. He did not respond to that either.
-With The Daily Star input
