THE HAGUE: Police have arrested 118 people in an unprecedented globally-coordinated swoop on plane ticket credit card fraud, a billion-dollar organised cri­me industry, officials said on Friday.

Operation Global Airport Action at 80 airports in 45 countries was coordinated from Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, Interpol in Singapore and Latin Amer­ican agency Ameripol in Bogota.

Police teams at airports from London to Manila arrested suspects who had used fraudulent credit card details to buy plane tickets as they queued to board or as they landed at their destination, said Europol chief Rob Wainwright.

“It’s a billion-dollar a year problem for the airline industry... and the volume of traffic is huge,” Wainwright said during the two-day operation on Wednesday and Thursday.

“We had to design a global operation to put us into any kind of position to stop the guys from boarding the flights or indeed to apprehend them on arrival”. Inside Europol’s fortress-like headquarters, experts from credit card companies, including Visa and American Express, as well as airline representatives and police analysts worked closely together.

Published in Dawn, November 29th , 2014