Shenzhen police busted a credit card forgery ring and confiscated 41,000 counterfeit credit cards earlier this year, police announced yesterday.

It was the biggest credit card forgery case in China in terms of the number of counterfeit cards confiscated, police spokesman Li Honglang told a press conference yesterday. The fake cards were copies of five major international credit card brands, namely Visa, Mastercard, Diners Club, American Express, and JCB.

Li said some of the counterfeit cards carried the cardholders' information. Police are still interrogating the suspects on how they obtained the information and are contacting the credit card companies to see if any of the counterfeit cards had been used.

Acting on a tip-off from their Hong Kong colleagues, Shenzhen police raided two apartments in Luohu District at noon February 22, where they found about 39,000 counterfeit credit cards, with about 38,000 being stored in one apartment.

On February 23, police raided a factory in Buji Subdistrict, Longgang District, where they found equipment for counterfeiting the cards, and 1,200 fake credit cards.

Four suspects were arrested, including a Hong Kong resident surnamed Liu, who was allegedly in charge of selling and using the cards overseas. Three others were a man surnamed Huang, responsible for inputting information into the cards, a man surnamed Zeng, in charge of the factory, and a man surnamed Zhu, responsible for storing and transporting the counterfeit cards.

The spokesman said the possibility of information leaking from banks was very low. "The Hong Kong man, who was the ringleader, was not a bank employee," he said.

The police estimated that the counterfeit cards could have caused economic losses of more than 900 million yuan (US$112 million) if they were used.

(Shenzhen Daily April 12, 2006)