Three men received bail from Milton Keynes police station yesterday
without charge, having been arrested on Tuesday following a six
month investigation into the fake applications.
Egg admitted to being defrauded of “about £5000” by the gang,
although police sources are reported as having suggested a figure
of nearly twice that amount. The fraudulently obtained Egg credit
cards were used to make purchases, both on-line and in shops. The
fraud was detected when Egg worked with police to create software
to detect multiple on-line account applications.
An Egg spokesman said: “The money was taken from the bank
itself. No money from Egg’s 1.2 million customers was at risk… The
internet’s role in all this was simply that they made their
applications on-line – and that our systems were able for that
reason to pick up the anomaly.”
A spokesman for Smile, owned by the Co-operative Bank, added
that: “The internet is irrelevant in this case – it would be the
same operation whether they had applied by post or on-line.”
Cahoot, Abbey National’s internet bank, said it has examined its
records and found no applications that matched the Egg case.
