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.