$200 Million Muslim Credit Card Fraud Ring Busted

February 12, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield 11 Comments

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Debbie Schlussel reports on a USA Today story about the largest or one of the credit card fraud rings ever busted in the US.

How much of that money went to terrorists can only be speculated,  but some of the money was wired to Pakistan and in the Muslim world, crime networks tend to be entangled with terrorist networks as they both have the international connections and the operatives to move the money and the loot around.

An international credit fraud ring racked at least $200 million in fraudulent charges to acquire luxury cars, gold and high-end goods, and funnel millions in cash overseas, federal prosecutors said Tuesday. The elaborate scheme — one of the largest ever uncovered by the U.S. Justice Department — started small but eventually spread to 28 states and eight countries. Prosecutors revealed the charges in a criminal indictment against 18 alleged conspirators and say they supported a massive network of co-conspirators that’s expected to lead to more indictments.
Prosecutors say the accused pumped up their credit worthiness by making small purchases and paying off the charges, enabling them to run up credit lines and make large charges that were never repaid. By 2012, they had created more than 7,000 false identities to obtain more than 25,000 credit cards. Millions in cash were wired to Pakistan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, China and Japan. . . .Losses are pegged at more than $200 million but are expected to grow.
At least eight in the group — Babar Quresh, Muhammad Shafiq, Ijaz Butt, Qaiser Khan, Shafique Ahmed, Muhammad Naveed, Khawaja Ikram and Nasreen Akhtar — have been unemployed since 2008.
Some of the defendants are accused of setting up 80 sham companies with little or no legitimate business operations, including jewelry stores in Jersey City, N.J. Those businesses accepted credit card payments and provided bogus credit reports that helped inflate fake cardholders’ credit ratings.

Most of these men appear to be Pakistanis and Pakistan has a high level of corruption and is Ground Zero for all sorts of illegal international transactions. Pakistani banks are black holes and when you layer Islamic finance and the networks of immigrants sending money back and forth, off the books, then you have all the ingredients of a black market financial network.
New Jersey’s large Islamic population and the state’s history of corruption have only made matters worse by creating safe havens for criminality. There are a lot of Pakistanis in New Jersey and the authorities have no interest in what goes on in their enclaves so long as they vote the right way. That congeniality was on display when New Jersey corrupt pols attacked the NYPD for its surveillance of terrorist mosques in the Garden State. And See No Evil is still how it is until the Feds step in.