Thai police have arrested a Malaysian man for allegedly stealing credit-card information from Krung Thai Bank by using telephone wiretaps to hack into its database.

The Department of Special Investigation Director-general Sombat Amornwiwat said the man, had caused more than Bt100 million in damage to the bank, which had kept the information theft a secret to avoid causing panic among its cardholders.

The Nation newspaper quoted Sombat as saying that the suspect, who had also sold at least one fake credit card with a ready-to-use number for Bt10,000, was part of a racket operating in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.

Bernama also carried the report.

He said bank customers who regularly ran up card balances of more than Bt100,000 were prime targets of the Malaysian suspect but did not say how the hacking or phone bugging had been carried out.

Sombat however warned that people using KTC cards in the region south of Hat Yai district in Songkhla, which is nearer to Malaysia, were at risk of having had their credit-card details stolen.

Fake cards back in place

According to the director-general, the ring included store clerks who took down shoppers credit-card numbers and others who then sold items obtained through payments charged to an unsuspecting shopper's credit card.

He could face a prison term of up to seven years and six months as well as a fine of between Bt30,000 and Bt150,000 under a new anti-cyber-crime law.

The paper also quoted Colonel Yannapol Yangyuen, chief of the Police Information Technology Centre, as saying that gang members sometimes put fake cards back in place of the real ones they stole in order to stave off the cancellation of the card.