May 2, 2007

NEWS: Brit Media Goes Crazy Over LTTE Scam

It seems that all the major newspapers in London (including the Telegraph and the Times), along with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), are giving almost unlimited publicity to the supposed enormous credit card scam cooked up by Sri Lankan anti-government gang the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to fund terrorist activities. And with good reason: the scope of the scam ring in question is almost unprecedented. Police say that the LTTE – whose presence and activities are banned in Britain – are alleged to have filched millions of pounds of Britons’ money by doctoring gas station credit and debit card reader machines to “skim” card numbers, in the interest of cloning the original cards and withdrawing funds from the victims’ accounts.

The fact that the Times – which prides itself as one of (if not the one) most reputable papers in the capital – has picked up the story seems to, in and of itself, lend credence to the conspiracy theory. Police are now combing the records of some two hundred gas stations in Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Norfolk, Peterborough, Bristol, and Nottingham. The methods used in the latest British scams are said to be eerily similar to those used by confirmed LTTE fraud artists in Thailand. In turn, those methods are thought to have been originally perfected by Al Qaeda, the notorious Islamic terrorists.

Sri Lanka is cooperating closely with the British investigation, mostly to make a show of the fact that they are mortified and troubled by the separatists’ actions. The people of Sri Lanka are anxious to prove that they do not at all condone such activity, say representatives of the Sri Lankan government, and are eager to see the matter solved, with those responsible brought to justice.


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