A credit card cloner in Georgia had an unusual way of making sure his new accomplices weren't posing as cops — he forced them to have group sex.
Living in an upscale suburb of Athens, Ga., Vikas Yadav recruited henchmen for his multimillion dollar credit card fraud ring using chat rooms geared toward people interested in sadomasochistic sex. Before the wannabe fraudsters were granted entry into Yadav's inner circle, he made them participate in orgies with both men and women while he joined in and videotaped.
"Basically, everyone that become involved (in the ring) met Vikas in S&M chat sites, and (the way) for them to get into the inner sanctum of the group was to have sex with him and others, and be videoed doing it," Athens-Clarke police detective Beverly Russell told the Athens Banner-Herald. "Anyone who wanted in with (Yadav) would have to have three-way sex, either with other men or women, but Vikas had to be involved and he would record it all and save the recordings so he could watch it on his big flat-screen TV."
"That was to protect himself, to keep cops from infiltrating his group," she added.
When cops busted Yadav and his cybercrime syndicate, they found the TV in his bedroom rigged to a pair of 12-terabyte external hard drives to house his "extensive collection of porn videos."
Yadav's own entry into the cybercrime underground took place after he was expelled from the University of Georgia's College of Pharmacy master's degree program in 2004. He then took a job at a liquor store, where he began skimming customers' credit card information using a keylogger.
He would then encode blank credit cards with the stolen financial data and distribute the cloned cards to his accomplices, who made cash withdrawals from ATMs and purchased big-ticket items like flat-screen TVs.
Three of Yadav's accomplices, including Dwight Riddick, a former New York City police officer, were sentenced in federal court in January. Yadav, who was deported to India before sentencing, faces up to 25 years in prison for credit card fraud.