The police, determined to protect the pockets of the kings, presidents and prime ministers due in Kuala Lumpur for a summit meeting next week, nabbed three credit card fraudsters before the VIPs even hit town, a report said today.

Policemen patrolling the city streets for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit seized about 100 fake credit cards from the men, who were picked up as they were about to leave a four-star hotel in a suspected stolen car, The Star said.

Malaysia has a reputation as a hotspot for credit card fraud, and it is feared that cloning syndicates plan to make a killing at the 114-nation summit to be attended by 58 heads of government and senior officials with high credit levels.

"Since most of the delegates are high-ranking officials, their credit card limits are high -- the o­nes most sought after by the cloners," Federal Commercial Crime director Maizan Shaari told AFP .

"It will be embarrassing for us, if a month after the summit, the delegates find out that their credit cards have been used o­n a shopping spree by the syndicates."

Maizan said police would check credit card terminals at hotels occupied by delegates as well as nearby shopping centres to ensure there were no skimming devices or encoders.

He said such high-tech devices were able to capture card data stored in the magnetic strips in just about two seconds, with each device able to store the data of 100 cards.

Bankers said Malaysia has the worst card fraud record in the region, although no statistics were available. AFP