Woman jailed for defrauding an investor of Dhs1.66m in Dubai

Mohammed Yaseen, Staff Reporter

The Dubai Misdemeanor Court sentenced an Asian woman to two years in jail to be followed by deportation and fined her Dhs1.166 million on fraud charges.

The defendant defrauded an Asian investor by offering him to be a partner in a massage centre and thus being able to take Dhs1.166 million from him. The court then referred the civil case to the competent court.

Earlier, an Asian investor filed a complaint in which he stated that he had been defrauded and robbed of Dhs1.166 million with a partnership fraud in a fake massage centre and phishing messages attributed to regulatory authorities.

According to the victim’s statement, the defendant offered him to be her partner in a massage centre that she owned as she had a long experience in this field.

The victim stated in the interrogations that after he had agreed to be the defendant’s partner and as soon as the partnership procedures had been completed, the defendant deluded him that he had to pay fines incurred by the centre; otherwise, he would be jailed and banned.

To support her allegations, the defendant used names of unreal officers in police stations and wrote letters that she alleged that they had come from police stations, thus fraudulently stimulating him to transfer more money from his bank account to hers until he was drained of all his money.

According to the official documents, the defendant requested her partner to pay another fine of Dhs166,000; otherwise she would hand his passport and ID card over to the police.

As the defendant continued to threaten him, the victim decided to seek the help of a lawyer to bring these cases to an end. The lawyer, however, told him that he had been defrauded by the defendant as no lawsuits were filed against him and no fines were imposed on the centre.

The victim then asked the defendant to return his money, but the latter told him that she did not have the money at the time and wrote him a document in which she acknowledged receipt of his money. As the defendant tended to procrastinate, the victim told the police accordingly.

On interrogation, the defendant denied the victim’s allegations but after being faced with the phishing documents and messages that the victim received, she confessed to having swindled money from the victim.