Three men have gone on trial at the Circuit Criminal Court in Cork charged in connection with an alleged credit card counterfeiting operation uncovered by gardaí earlier this year.
All three men, who have addresses in London, have pleaded not guilty to a total of 16 charges each.
On 3 June detective gardaí John McDonagh and Damian Moloney stopped a car at Wilton in Cork city and, after speaking to the driver, decided to search his home.
They went to a house on nearby Elmvale Avenue and when they got there they found four men in the living room.
One of the men was operating a laptop computer, another was writing on a piece of paper and a third man had a gold cigarette box on a table.
The box was later found to contain plastic cards the same size as credit cards.
The four men were arrested. In the room gardaí later found a credit card swipe machine, bundles of Tesco club cards and an electronic device for reading and writing data on credit cards.
Three of the four men went on trial today.
It is the State's case that they were part of a credit card counterfeiting gang and that they were involved in a joint enterprise and were in the process of making counterfeit credit cards which could be inserted into an ATM machine to withdraw money.
The three men are Mohammed Khaleed, Mohammed Majid and Ali Raza.
The trial is expected to last for over a week.
