Card clone pair jailed

Two Hungarian men have been jailed for three years for running a credit card cloning factory from a property in Sutton.

Atilla Horvat, 27, and Gabor Szabor, 33, were found with 70 cloned credit cards after an alert shop security guard in Kingston town centre noticed them paying a lot of attention to a cash machine last September.

They were stopped by officers in a car park at Bishops Hall, arrested and taken into custody, charged initially with being equipped to steal. One tried to avoid arrest by hiding in a rubbish bin.

The men used high-tech card-reader camera equipment to obtain people’s credit card Pin numbers when they slotted their cards into ATM machines.

The Pin numbers were photographed by a hidden camera and details then transferred onto a laptop computer.

Detectives from Kingston CID and a financial investigator linked Horvat and Szabor to an address in Conifer Gardens, Sutton, where a further 200 cloned cards and £3,000 in cash was seized.

Police also found equipment used to collect details from legitimate cards to create cloned cards as well as evidence showing cash transfers from the UK to Romania. They estimated each cloned card could be re-sold for about £900.

The pair were jailed for three years at Kingston Crown Court on April 25, after being found guilty of conspiring to steal.

Detect Sergeant Cummings of Kingston CID said: “Through the professionalism of the officers in charge of this case, we were able to disrupt and stop the organised and well established criminal activity of these two men. We have saved thousands of pounds from being stolen and further distress or inconvenience to the public.”

The court also seized more than £8,000 under powers to confiscate the proceeds of criminal activity.