Shah Rukh

Mumbai, Feb. 15: If Shah Rukh Khan plays a character who has his credit card stolen, he may need a little coaching to come up with a close-to-life performance.

When Mumbai police informed the star this week that they had caught three jobless men with his credit card, the expression on Shah Rukh’s face was one of mild surprise. He hadn’t missed the card.

“He didn’t know he had lost the card but has extended his full cooperation in the matter,” senior inspector Prakash Landge of Mulund police station said today.

The actor told the police he hardly used the card in Mumbai; he used it mostly while shopping abroad. Shah Rukh recently bought a custom-made pram in London for friend Farah Khan’s triplets.

SRK may not have been alert enough, but a sales executive at a Mulund mall was.

Three men had walked into Shopper’s Stop in Nirmal Lifestyle on February 10 and picked up trousers and T-shirts worth about Rs 25,000. At the payment counter, one of them pulled out an ICICI credit card.

The sales executive was surprised to see that the name on the transaction slip was “Shah Rukh Khan”. Then the customer made a schoolboy error — he signed his name on the slip as Vinay Vijay Tambe.

The employee asked the trio to wait and called up ICICI Bank to verify the card’s authenticity. He then called the police.

Tambe, 22, James Paul Peremal, 28, and Shekar Jadhav, 44, have been remanded in police custody till February 18.

“ICICI Bank has confirmed that the card belongs to Shah Rukh Khan. We are trying to find out whether it was stolen or lost. Of course, the big question is: how did it come into Tambe’s hands?” Landge said.

The trio’s version is that they found the card lying on a road in Santa Cruz a few days before their arrest.

Landge and his colleagues got in touch with Bandra police to check if SRK had reported losing a credit card. “They told us he had only lodged a complaint about a lost passport,” the senior inspector said.

The police did not reveal what the credit limit on the card was, but it may not have been high enough to matter to one of India’s richest celebrities.

Shah Rukh, however, might want to invite Tambe to his next TV show — Kya Aap Paanchvi Paas Se Tez Hain? — to ask him a fifth grade-level question: Do you sign your real name if you are using a stolen credit card?