More Fraudulent UAE Firms Perform the Vanishing Act!
It looks like companies are making a habit of circumventing the system to steal millions in goods.
A couple of months after the Blue Chip scam made headlines in the UAE and weeks after other companies defrauded people out of similar big monies, two more UAE-based companies have done a Houdini. Future Star Electromechanical Works and Alpha Star Building Contracting diddled their hapless clients out of AED 12 million before vanishing. That translates to nearly 3.3 million US dollars in losses.
The Loot
Try this on for size: 200 cartons of chicken, volumes of flight tickets and tourist destination bookings, hundreds of mobile phones and laptops, nearly 12,000 metres of cable, and tonnes upon tonnes of construction materials. All this was stolen before the errant firms lowered and locked their shutters, switched off their cell phones and had their staff seemingly evaporate into thin air.
The Modus Operandi
How did the conning companies pull off this apparent heist? Bogus post-dated payment cheques and quick dispatches turned out to be the fraudsters’ strategy. One of their robbed clients - Indian businesswoman Deepti Singh - had no real reason to think that foul play was afoot. After all, she had already visited the firms’ offices and warehouses and had interacted with their staff who had shown her several documents like bank statements and audit reports.
The Sting
Mrs. Singh provided the companies with a whole slew of building items, and that too in bulk, between May 25th and July 2nd. Plus, a 30-day payment term was signed and attested to. But the moolah didn’t come by the due dates, coercing her to frantically run to the firms… only to discover that they had shut shop. The distraught Ms. Deepti, who had invested heavily in the materials, claims that it took Future and Alpha just 13 hours to vanish with her goods. Now, this distraught mother of a little girl is at her wits end.
The Others Deceived
Among the other losers in this terrible ordeal are one Mr. “R.K” who handed over 85 Lenova computers amounting to 265 thousand AED in value; a travel agency owner who bought numerous flight tickets and tourism experiences; a pipe-supplier who has suffered 57 thousand AED in losses; and a Mr. “J.W.” who was conned out of AED 300,000 in food stuffs. Magicians David Blaine and David Copperfield, move over! You ain’t got nothing on Future Star and Alpha Star! Meanwhile, what do the banks and other authorities involved in this fiasco have to say for themselves?
