Africans top credit card crime list: Dubai Police

Credit cards crime cases are increasingly being reported due to the increase in police raids, a top official from Dubai Police said.

In the first three quarters of this year, Dubai Police received over 100 cases compared to 88 cases the whole of 2009, Major Khalid Arif Al Shaikh, Head of Forgery Section at the Anti-Economic Crime Department at Dubai Police.

He added that the amount involved in these cases varies, and in some cases, it goes to up to Dh200,000 when the suspect purchases expensive items such as jewellery.

“The cases are on the raise due to the increase in our raids. We have solved majority of the cases no matter how clever the suspects are.”

He pointed out that majority of suspects are African. “African tops the list of suspects in credit cards cases, followed by Far Eastern suspects. Arabs are minority in such crimes.”

Major Al Shaikh added that the suspects get these cards in two ways. “In one case, the hackers hack the systems and get the details of the bank’s customers and their credit card numbers, and then they issue a fake card with these numbers and use them. In other cases, a staff from the bank sell these details to suspects in return for a percentage of the amount withdrawn.”

He added that they discover the credit cards crime cases in two ways. “Either the banks file a case when they see transactions on a card which was not issued to the clients yet; or the client reports the case to the police when he or she notice a transaction on their account which they did not do.”

He added that most of the banks are insured for such crimes. “As for the clients, either the bank compensates them, or they wait for the police to arrest the suspects and then return the stolen money to them.”

Major Al Shaikh added that they arrest the suspects by tracing the transactions.

“We see the shops where these cards were used, and get pictures of the suspects from the security cameras installed in these shops. The problem is that the suspects are very clever now. They never perform any transactions themselves. They use a middleman, and in most of the cases the middleman never see the main suspect.”

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