Employee of bank jailed for 3 years in fraud case
- 12 Jan 2022
Picture used for illustrative purpose only.
Mohammed Yaseen, Staff Reporter
A customer service employee at a bank took advantage of his job to access the clients’ accounts and gave the data to another anonymous to steal the money from the bank customers’ accounts, in return for Dhs20,000.
The Dubai Criminal Court sentenced the suspect to 3 years in prison, followed by deportation and fined him Dhs42,000, but the Appellate Court commuted the jail term to one year only and upheld the fine and deportation.
Details date back to March 2021 when one of the bank clients complained that she was defrauded by someone who claimed to be a customer service employee at the bank.
He told her the bank was updating the clients’ data to protect them from fraud.
The victim added that the person told her the details of her account, the card number and the amounts in the account.
She indicated that during the call, she received an (OTP) and the suspect told her it was a confirmation message on the data updating, so she provided him with all the information he asked.
Then, she was surprised when Dhs10,000 was withdrawn from her account. When she contacted the bank she was told that the withdrawal was done by mistake and the amount will be returned after receiving another SMS but the other message indicated that another amount of Dhs10,000 was withdrawn and then the person ended the call.
The police investigations and the Bank's Fraud Prevention Department revealed that the suspect accessed the victim’s account 6 times before the fraud committed, so he was arrested.
On being interrogated, he confessed that he connived with another person who had the powers to access the electronic system of the bank for which he worked and that the latter provided him with the Bank's customers data, including their phone numbers, details of their cards and their accounts, including the financial statements of the victims, in return for amounts of money.
He added that the suspect provided him with the data of 100 clients.