Prolific chip and pin fraudster jailed

Theogenes De Montford, 29, was at the heart of a gang that could have made millions of pounds of profit.

Recorder Nicholas Rhodes QC yesterday told the software engineering graduate "the motivating factor was greed and the huge profits you could make with your skills from this crime".

De Montford used his skills to modify the pin entry devices used by customers to enter their credit card number at petrol stations.

Shell, Texaco and Somerfield garages were targeted in Kent, Leicestershire, Bristol, Littlehampton in West Sussex and St Neot's in Cambridgeshire, Southwark Crown Court in central London heard.

Adam Budworth, for the prosecution, said: "He was perhaps one of the most prolific chip and pin fraudsters in the UK. Since his arrest there has been a significant reduction in the number of chip and pin frauds in the UK."

The cases highlighted in court "can only be the tip of the iceberg", he added.

Sir Lankan-born De Montford, who will be deported on his release, was found with a laptop containing 35,000 card details, 7,000 of which came from a single Shell garage at Bluebell Hill in Maidstone, Kent.

Amrik Kalsi, the owner of the franchise, told the court his business dropped by 47 per cent as he was unaware his machine had been targeted for two months.

He was subjected to a "campaign of vilification" both online and in his community which was "understandable but totally unjustified", the judge said.

A Facebook group was launched to encourage others not to use his garage and he suffered "regular verbal abuse" from customers.

The loss of business had a "dramatic effect" on his personal finances and, for small franchises, the impact can be "fatal", the judge said.

In a victim impact statement, a spokesman for Shell UK added this type of fraud – not all of it carried out by De Montford – resulted in a 25 per cent drop in their business in the UK.

The judge said that if a figure of 1,000 per cloned card was used, the potential losses over the nine-month scam ran to 35m. But the actual loss was put at about 725,000, the court heard.

De Montford, who came to the UK in 2001, and other gang members, including some he recruited, would modify the pin entry devices by inserting a circuit board, memory device and bluetooth transmitter into the existing machinery.

This would either be done by recruiting an assistant at the garage to the scam or discreetly burning a hole into the back of the device and inserting the extra equipment while a fellow gang member provided a distraction.

The new kit would store data from credit cards used by customers and transmit it to the gang, allowing them to create cloned cards.

On occasions, masked men would attend the garages late at night to attempt "nakedly and brazenly" to get sales attendants to help them modify the machines.

Jonathan Mann, in mitigation for De Montford, said his client was a man of previous good character who turned to crime after being offered a way out of debt by some "unsavoury characters" whom he owed 3,500.

De Montford, of Blandford Way, Hayes, west London, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to possess articles for use in the course of fraud and was sentenced after the conclusion of a related trial.

Three other gang members were each sentenced to three and a half years in jail after being found guilty last week of conspiracy to defraud.

Rajakumar Thevathasan, 34, of Hayward Close, Wimbledon; Rashid Hassan, 26, of Queen Adelaide Court, Anerley, south-east London; and Usman Mahmood, 26, of Norbury Crescent, Streatham, south-west London all played lesser roles in the conspiracy, the court heard.