KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 9 — A cook and his accomplice lived it up for three years by stealing over 300 credit cards from joggers.
Their recipe was to break into cars and steal credit cards from the wallets of people who had left them in their parked cars and gone jogging.
It is not known how much they had spent using the stolen credit cards.
Police said the cook and a wireman would travel more than 300km from Johor Baru to Kuala Lumpur on weekends and target joggers at recreational parks.
Their activities came to an end on Saturday morning when a jogger in Bukit Jalil caught them in action and alerted the police.
Cheras police chief ACP Mohan Singh said the duo, clad in jogging attire, would carry a paint scraper and an iron rod to break into cars the “classic way”.
He said the suspects were experts in breaking into cars.
“They would use the paint scraper to remove the rubber lining of the windscreen and then use the rod to unlock the door.
“After stealing the credit card, the suspects would replace it with a stolen credit card and lock the car.”
Mohan said victims would not even realise that their car had been broken into.
A police report would only be lodged days or weeks later, when they realised their cards had been changed.
“The suspects admitted to being involved in 300 cases in the Klang Valley over the last three years,” said Mohan.
Police also found 154 credit cards in the suspects’ car, which they used to travel from Johor to Kuala Lumpur.
“The suspects travelled all the way here because they knew the parks here are crowded with easy targets.”
Mohan said there were also cases where the suspects stole laptops and expensive mobile phones but their main target was credit cards.
Mohan said the suspects would be handed over to other district police headquarters to be investigated for similar cases after their remand period in Cheras ends tomorrow.
