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Qazi Mansoor Hassan 
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A Royal Mirage--A Dubai scam
By: Asia Man
Updated on Friday, October 20, 2006 - 3:48:35 PM
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A Royal Mirage
Thinking of moving to Dubai? Think again.
Every year thousands of starry eyed entrepreneurs, investors, and professional workers flock into the city of splendor, hoping to take advantage of the golden opportunities. Dazzled by the kaleidoscope of skyscrapers, they enter Dubai assuming a proportional growth in every direction.
That assumption, they will soon realize, is wrong. They will eventually find out that beneath the visibly stunning chiffon of futurism there lays an invisible rag of primitiveness barely holding the system together. The starry eyed foreigner will realize that the fantastic Middle Eastern metropolis is not only physically but metaphorically built on sand.
It is said that every nation is as good as its laws and in Dubai that invisible primitive rag represents its laws and the ensuing security, or lack of it.
Major flaws in the judicial laws and subsequent corruption in the policing system will soon surface and a sense of uncertainty will slowly prevail in the mind of the foreigner.
This is a story of a several local residents who became victims of a recurring auto sale scam. They sold their expensive automobiles through advertisements in the local newspaper to individual buyers who offered fraudulent cheques and transferred the cars using fake documents, obviously unknown to the seller.
After reporting the scam to the authorities, in each case the duped seller was stupefied by the local police who never attempted to locate the, essentially stolen, cars. And by law they were considered victims of simple cases of bounced cheques. Each victim was systematically directed to the civil courts.
No effort was put into locating and black listing any of the cars and no investigation was carried out by the police in linking the cases in order to find the criminals and to stop their organized criminal activities. “It almost seemed as if the police was deliberately rewarding the criminals for being clever enough to dupe us,” said one of the victims. Every victim reported a feeling of betrayal by the police and doubted the police department’s allegiance to protecting the civilians.
Realizing that they are essentially on their own, through a collective effort and using their own investigative skills, the group set out to fight for their right and to obtain their property. Two of the cars were discovered at a well-known local car dealership and a third one had been sold through the same dealership to a local buyer. It was found that that particular used car company was commonly known for dealing in stolen cars yet the police was turning a blind eye.
More investigation by the victimized group revealed the identities of the culprits along with evidence describing their method of operation.
One interesting account was told by one of the victims, originally from Lebanon. He explained, “I was driving to the public prosecutor’s office when I realized I was being followed by a large SUV with tinted windows. The van pulled up beside me at a traffic light and a man in dark glasses rolled down the window. He then threatened to cut me into pieces if I testified against the suspect held in custody.” That morning, the Lebanese man dropped his claim against that particular suspect at the public prosecutor’s office.
Upon hearing of this threat, another victim of Turkish descent who also had to testify against the same suspect decided to drop her case altogether for fear of her own safety. She was so scared that would not even bother answering calls from the remaining victims.
Defiantly, the Lebanese family decided not to drop their case and because of that their ladies’ hair salon located on a main road in Dubai became an easy target for the gang members to harass them through. “We’ve had to lock the front door of our salon to stop men and women associated with this gang from entering our salon and harassing us. One morning we found eggs thrown at our entrance way,” the Lebanese victim reported with utter frustration. “We do not feel safe in this country any more. We’ve had to endure agonizing months at the courts without any results.”
One Canadian woman reported, “My stolen car has been sitting two blocks from my home for the past eighteen months. It has been proven at the courts that we have all been cheated in these cases, yet neither the courts nor the public prosecution are willing to make a decision on the cars and they continue to pass us between their offices like ping pong balls.”
Through their own investigation the group discovered that the police had hundreds of such cases and was fully aware of the problem. They also found that the criminal operation stretched across the UAE and it was successful because of the involvement of various government employees. More specifically, the criminals had infiltrated the police department, namely the traffic section where car ownerships are transferred.
The results of the extensive investigation were presented to the police department, the human rights department, the public prosecution, the judicial courts, the Ruler’s court and the Private Office of the Crown Prince and the Palace of the current Ruler. Each entity systematically ignored the problem and insisted that the cases were simple cheque problems and that the cars were lawfully owned by their new owners, (even though the transactions were clearly unlawful.)
The local press was also contacted and presented with the mind boggling amount of evidence. However, they were reluctant to cover the story in depth fearing reprisal by the local government.
The conclusion reached by the group was that through a well organized system these gangs are continuously duping foreigners and extracting millions of dollars every year through buying and selling cars fraudulently and exporting them to other countries. This blatant criminal activity is publicly known in the UAE and the government is completely inactive about it.
The reasons why this type of crime is so prevalent in Dubai are, at least, the following:
1. With the help of the authorities these cars are easily and immediately transferred through the Dubai Traffic Department using forged documents. The final owner then claims legal ownership of the car.
2. Upon reporting the cases to the police department the cars are not immediately tracked nor placed on a blacklist as expected in any civil society.
3. Despite the fact that all the cases are interlinked, the public prosecution department and the courts insist that the cases must be dealt with separately.
4. Every case is considered a stand alone cheque related case and not part of an organized crime and therefore the original owner must file a civil suit in order to obtain the money or the car. In effect a criminal case is washed by being handed over to the civil courts.
5. The public prosecutor refuses to investigate the fraudulent method used to transfer the cars to various fake buyers.
6. Almost all the victims never file a civil suit because of the high court fees and the lengthy court procedures and therefore they drop the case all together.
7. Those who do pursue their case are threatened by the gang and are forced to drop their case out of fear for their safety.
8. The rare occasion when one of the gang members is convicted for such a crime, he serves a nominal time in prison and then freed to continue the crime.
9. The press is scared to talk about it.
Since May 2005 none of the victims who pursued their cases at the courts have succeeded in obtaining their stolen property back from the current car owners.
The results of the investigation has been compiled in www.dubailaw.blogspot.com
Note :writer do not want to disclose his name and identity