Credit Card Theft Ringleader Vikas Yadav Forced Accomplices Into Group Sex to Prove They Weren’t Cops

The ringleader of a massive Georgia-based credit card theft operation forced would-be accomplices to participate in group sex sessions with him and others in order to prove they were’t cops.

According to the Athens Banner- Herald, Vikas Yadav, an Indian national who originally came to the U.S. to earn his master’s degree in pharmacy, was expelled from school after being caught plagiarizing. He then went to work in a liquor store, where he began his criminal career. He installed a recording device on the store’s credit card reader and began stealing account numbers and PINs he later encoded on blank cards in order to withdraw cash and purchase big-ticket electronic items for resale.

“He had dealers lined up who placed orders for specific items, like 50 to 60 flatscreen TVs of a certain size and brand,” Athens-Clarke Police Detective Beverly Russell told the Banner-Herald. “It’s not like he sent people randomly to go to the store. He had shopping lists with items already lined up to buy.”

Yadav was busted in August 2008 outside a Mississippi Walmart. Police found a stack of credit cards and a duffel bag with a laptop and encoding equipment inside. There were also multiple TVs, Wii gaming consoles and other electronics in the van.

Police looking for Yadav back in Georgia just happened to run into accomplice Dwight Riddick, a former NYPD officer, as he arrived with a truck full of newly-purchased TVs.

The details of Yadav’s bizarre sexual exploits came to light through the testimony of his accomplices. He sought those accomplices in internet chat rooms for people interested in sadomasochistic sexual encounters. Anyone interested in joining his crime ring had to prove they weren’t law enforcement agents by having threesomes with Yadav and other men and women. Yadav filmed the orgies.

“Basically, everyone that became involved (in the ring) met Vikas in S&M chat sites, and (the way) for them to get into the inner sanctum of the group was to have sex with him and others, and be videoed doing it,” Detective Russell told the Banner-Herald. 

“That was to protect himself, to keep cops from infiltrating his group,” she told the paper. “This took one of the most bizarre turns in any case I’ve ever come across,” she added.

Yadav was found guilty and spent a year behind bars before being deported from the United States in 2010.

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