KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 16 — He checked into a five-star hotel and enjoyed a posh comfortable  stay.

The man never checked out. Instead, he disappeared.

Police finally caught up with him and his two accomplices for using fake credit cards to go on spending sprees after the hotel lodged a police report on Monday detailing that the payment went through but exceeded the card’s RM5,000 credit limit.

This led them to detecting the fraud.

The trio’s method was simple.

They would use a credit card until they exceeded the limit and the card would then be discarded.

The cards were linked to accounts from foreign banks and police are not ruling out the possibility of the two-year-old syndicate having links overseas.

“We are also talking to the banks’ credit card service providers to gather more details on the syndicate,” said Kuala Lumpur police chief Datuk Tajudin Mat Isa.

He confirmed all the cards were linked to foreign banks and no local banks were involved.

Tajudin said a report was lodged by the hotel at about 5pm on Monday after the management found that they had been cheated.

He said the commercial crime unit from the Dang Wangi police headquarters conducted investigations following the report.

“On Wednesday, a team from the commercial crime unit raided an apartment unit in Batu 9, Cheras and arrested two suspects,” he said.

He said further investigations led to the arrest of the third suspect in a mobile phone shop in Bukit Bintang.

One of the three was the man who had used the credit card at the hotel.

Tajudin said checks in the apartment unit revealed the place was used to produce fake credit cards.

Police confiscated 109 fake credit cards, 2,625 pieces of blank white plastic cards, a skimmer machine, a card-embossing machine, a credit card printer, a computer monitor and a foreign identity card.

The case is being investigated for cheating.

The trio, aged between 26 and 33, have been remanded until tomorrow.