Credit Card Ring - Broken

In the "one for the good guys" category the NYPD arrested 38 people last week who were involved in a phony credit card ring. The ring was producing 3,000 fake credit cards a month, in addition to fake driver's licenses from New York, Illinois and Washington.

The Organized Theft and Identity Theft Task Force recovered a credit card embossing machine, credit card coding machine, metal plates, gold and silver foil and 95 counterfeit credit cards. A hacker in China stole the card numbers.

New York based shoppers would fly to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Miami to purchase expensive items and then sell them on the internet. The total amount of dollars stolen could be in the millions, police said. This capped a 14-month investigation that started when one retailer became suspicious when a fake New York driver's license was used to buy a computer. Police linked that arrest to a similar one and thus began extensive surveillance and wiretapping investigation of thousands of calls, many in Chinese.

The perpetrators are facing up to 25 years in prison.