A teenage girl is to appear in court on Friday on charges of fraud and money laundering, after she was arrested for being part of a group who allegedly used sophisticated equipment to clone credit cards.
The police are still investigating how information, found in the magnetic strip of the original credit card, was copied without raising the suspicion of the real owners.
The 17-year-old suspect, who is married with a baby, was arrested in Table View on Wednesday night by the police's commercial crime unit.
She was to appear in the Cape Town magistrate's court on Friday.
The police believe she was not working alone and are expecting to make further arrests.
They want to question her husband, who was not home at the time of her arrest, and are also on the trail of those who purchased cloned Visa and Mastercard credit cards.
When the police raided the house in Sloane Square, Table View, they found and seized sophisticated equipment allegedly used in the credit card cloning process. It included embossing machines, a card reader and skimming device, computers and office equipment.
Also seized were valuable household items, including brand new appliances still in their wrapping, two beds, a plasma-screen television, a hi-fi system and a DVD player.
Police spokesperson Superintendent Debby Pheiffer said the list of items, valued at hundreds of thousands of rands, went "on and on".
Pheiffer confirmed on Friday that several blank credit cards had also been confiscated.
The raid on the Table View house, co-owned by the suspect, followed a tip-off to police.
Pheiffer said when police arrived only the domestic worker and the suspect's baby were at home. The mother arrived about 8pm and was arrested.
She said the modus operandi in cases of this kind was that fraudsters used a skimmer to read the information on the magnetic strip of Visa and Mastercards.
They transferred this information on to blank cards using a computer, then embossed names on the cards before selling them.
Pheiffer said the price of the cloned card depended on the credit limit of the original card. "The higher the credit limit, the more expensive the clone."
When a cloned card was offered as payment for a transaction, money would be withdrawn from the real owner's credit account.
Pheiffer said the real owners would not be aware of the fraudulent transaction because they would still have their own cards.
They would find out about it only after getting their monthly statements from the bank.
She declined to place a figure on the amount of money that could have been drawn from people's accounts using cloned cards in this case.