A 32-year-old man has been jailed two years and two weeks for being part of a transnational counterfeit credit card syndicate, and for drug possession.

He was arrested March 3 while checking in at Hong Kong International Airport when a credit card shredder, three notebooks and a small quantity of cannabis were found in his possession.

The District Court heard he had been recruited by a Dongguan man on the Mainland to escort a number of people to shop in Milan in August 2007 using counterfeit credit cards.

Two of the notebooks, which contained 354 sets of incomplete credit card data, were used as ledgers for recording the fraudulent transactions in order to calculate the commission earned by each person.

He was intending to travel to Milan for counterfeit credit card transactions and the cannabis was for his own consumption.

The prosecution applied provisions of the Criminal Jurisdiction Ordinance to lay the charge of conspiracy to defraud against the man, despite the conspiracy taking place on the Mainland and the fraudulent credit card transactions were in Italy.