Abu Dhabi resident who lost Dh734,000 in trading scam still being hassled by agents 5 years on
One woman from Abu Dhabi, reports being a victim of $200,000 scams due to opening an account on a fake trading website five years ago. The woman is still being targeted by scammers almost five years later.
The woman stated the scammers called her recently and stated that she was to move her account because it had already been moved to another website. The affair began in June 2019 when the woman saw a targeted advertisement on Facebook for a trading website ufx.com, which has since been deactivated.
“I was not that busy and so I thought I would give it a try, hell, I wrote my information and registered on that website,” said the Jordanian IT manager. She also got a phone call straight away from an agent inviting her to send copies of her ID, a copy of her phone bill and a copy of her lease as documents proving her residential address in the United Arab Emirates.
“It was a number from Bahrain that raised some eyebrows on my part, but nevertheless, the representative sounded professional, and I was also getting landline calls from their so-called ‘documentation department’. Then I took the trouble to make a few calls to their contact center, and in my opinion the company appeared to be genuine.”
Following the exchange of documents and communication, her ‘portfolio’ was finally greenlit, and then she got another call. “He told me how safe the trading is on UFX and persuaded me to start with a 50000 dollars deposit,” the 45-year-old explained.
“At first there were two successful deals with a payment of 2000 dollars a day which brought back my faith in UFX and online trading in general.” The agent however did not stop there and persuaded her to make an additional deposit of 50000 dollars – which she lost as a result of the “perturbation in market conditions”.
Having lost half of her investment capital, the woman opted out of UFX trading and retrieved her last available funds on her account.
“The following day, the agent called me and expressed his displeasure over my request to withdraw cash out of my account; he was once again convincing and told me to leave the account and that successful deals would come in to cover for the losses sustained.
The narrator highlights the feeling that, at first, the intrusion of the agent looking for new deals was rather welcome thanks to his apparent success. After sitting idle for a couple of months, while her summer holidays were spent in Syria, the woman got a phone call from an agent — only this time he used a different approach: “the deal that was promised to be life-changing for her focused on oil.”
"Once again, she suffered a loss and the other party asked her to send more money to her so-called UFX account. She was also advised to take a 3-year Dh300,000-loan which they claimed was necessary to finalize the other deal so that all her investments could become profitable and her losses be fully compensated."
Still, the woman ended up losing all the money and was put into “deep shock” Emotional shock after the loss.
She wrote more emails to UFX support and after that she noticed one of the other agents starting to call her again and ask her to deposit more money to keep the account alive.
This time she did not allow such a situation to arise. “I was out of cash anyway, as I had spent one third of my salary in availing the loan each month,” she mentioned.
The woman claims to have been overwhelmed by the amount of work that came up after the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. “The excessive amount of work that was coming my way helped me concentrate on my work and stop myself from thinking about my losses,” explained the woman.
However, fraudulent agents kept on calling the woman until recently stating that the UFX accounts were being moved onto a different platform called Amana.
The woman claims that they also gave her a username, and password to reactivate her wallet under Noor Capital which she later found out was fake.
“The bottom line is that scammers will stop at nothing, they will keep calling under a different name and with different persuasion tactics,” she said.
Scammers use popular corporate names, logos
According to Lt-Col Ali Al Nuaimi, the head of cyber security at Abu Dhabi Police, it is normal for e-counterfeiters to redirect users from one website to another because creating a completely fake page might be too substantial an effort. This was the case with the Abu Dhabi woman as well.
He further remarked on the fraudulent individuals who mimic the names and the logos of famous companies as it is easy for the people to trust them unknowingly.
At the beginning, they will make you believe that you have won more money than you actually did, so that you think of them in a more positive light and therefore are encouraged to send more money for investment. “Online fraud will never come to an end; it will only morph according to existing measures and new ones that may come up,” Lt Col Ali Al Nuaimi said.
'Swindled out of Dh2,500'
Goran Jovanovic, the fitness trainer from Serbia, stated that he was deceived by fraudistes who impersonated officers from the Dubai Police. ‘I received a call with the people saying they were Dubai police, they had all my details and claimed that some people were trying to leave the country in my name,’ said Jovanovic who is 37 years old.
‘They said they would send an OTP (one time password) to my phone and that I should give it to them to cancel the stolen ID card.’ In the beginning, Goran did try to push back stating that Polices' wealth of the knowledge should make them privy of the OTP in the first place, but ultimately, he was persuaded into believing that he was the lone recipient and since the policemen’s’ intentions were pure, finishing up the procedure over the phone was completely acceptable. ‘I got the OTP from (what showed to be an official Dubai police number), I received the sms and I gave the code,’ he says.
"Turns out it was a bank OTP and they were able to take my Dh2,500 from the bank."
Lt-Col Ali Al Nuaimi explained that swindlers are almost never able to succeed in hacking or forging sophisticated official applications such as Abu Dhabi Police or UAE Pass. “I don’t remember hearing about this type of case before.”
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