MONTREAL – Police launched raids early Tuesday morning in order to take down a bank-card fraud ring in Boucherville, Chambly, Laval, Longueuil, Magog and Montreal.
Quebec provincial police with officers from Laval, Longueuil and Montreal raided 20 homes on the north and south shores of the Island of Montreal.
Officials confirmed that 16 arrests were made as part of the strike against a debit-card cloning ring.
Details of the operation were released at a press conference on Tuesday morning, where the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) outlined how the scam worked.
Quebec fraudsters travelled to France and Germany, where they replaced point-of-sale terminals in supermarkets in order to obtain magnetic strip data.
This data was then sent to Boucherville, where it was decrypted and then used to create counterfeit debit cards.
According to police, data for as many as 30,000 bank accounts were cracked by the ring, including personal identification numbers.
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