new delhi blowing the lid off a firstofitskind fraud reported from the capital the crime branch has arrested the owner of a karol baghbased travel agency who allegedly stole mileage points worth millions of pounds collected by british airways fliers and booked tickets through them for his clients joint commissioner crime ravindra yadav told toi that one damanpreet singh bedi 34 who had been siphoning off the avios points a brand for global travel reward points has been arrested he was redeeming the points to buy tickets from british airways and other international airlines besides buying free stays in hotels across the globe according to british airways data 20 million points worth millions of pounds were stolen the airline however did not let genuine customers suffer losses the police and airline claimed whenever someone stole the points from the booking system the genuine passenger could redeem hisher points after opening the executive club account even when it came to the notice of ba that a few unauthorized persons were siphoning off the avios points by creating fake executive club accounts they let the points be redeemed by the genuine flier they approached us later yadav said we are assisting the police in india with an investigation into alleged fraudulent activity we would like to reassure customers that none of our systems has been illegally accessed and no executive club members have had their data accessed or frequent flyer points stolen a ba spokesperson said early this year british airways found that mileage points of some of the fliersmembers were redeemed illegally by unauthorized agencies in favour of other passengers who were not entitled to avail the same the facts were found correct and consequently a case was registered under ipc and it act sections pertaining to cheating and fraud and acp k p s malhotra was assigned the case said additional commissioner crime alok kumar it was revealed that some particular ip addresses were taking unauthorized access to the database of amadeus a platform which provides itenabled service for the global travel and tourism industry and is used by them to book tickets the same ips were being used in creating fake executive accounts the details of ip addresses used for unauthorized extraction of the avios points were obtained and the team zeroed down on kripa travels based on technical analysis and local intelligence dcp crime bhisham singh said bedi a resident of shahdara turned out to be a booking agent for the airline and had the user id to log into amadeus he stole the flier data like pnr number passenger name and other details then he created a fake executive club account at bacom in the name of the passenger to access the avios points in this way he accumulated the avios points of various passengers thereafter he used to purchase tickets by redeeming the collected points and sold the tickets to his clientele yadav said amadeus has conveyed to police they are working to