Dubai: Law enforcement agencies from all over the world, including Dubai Police, have joined forces to put a stop to online fraud, a top police officer said. In a series of operations spanning the last two years, hundreds of arrests were made, a number of them in Dubai.
The operations targeted criminal online services offering credit card credentials and fake plane tickets, and also aimed at protecting consumers from being duped by criminal enterprises.
Major General Khamis Mattar Al Mazeina, Dubai Police Chief, said that this is the result of taking part in Global Airline Action Day, where law enforcement agencies from all over the world, along with airlines, travel and credit card industries, joined forces in concerted action to combat online fraud involving stolen or fake credit card data to purchase plane tickets.
Dubai Police also participated in three of these global airline action operations that resulted in the arrest of 381 suspects in two years, the first i9n November 2014.
According to Europol, law enforcement agencies from all over the world took a concerted move to combat online fraud on November 26-27, 2014. The action led to 118 arrests and 281 suspicious activities were reported. The operation benefited 45 countries.
The operation was carried out globally through three coordination centres: Europol in The Hague, Interpol in Singapore and Ameripol in Bogota. Over 60 airlines and 45 countries were involved in the activity, which took place at over 80 airports across the world, the press release by Europol said.
“The June 2015 operation,” he said, “resulted in 130 arrests and benefited 49 countries. The third operation in November 2015, resulted in 133 arrests and benefited 32 countries.”
He explained that these operations are carried out periodically, and take almost six months to prepare for and the arrests are carried out over a period between two to five days. All participants feed their intelligence into one database.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) took part in the action, providing important fraud intelligence from its database.
“All entities that participated benefited greatly from the cooperation, as banks, airline and credit card companies knew their vulnerabilities and security gaps, and remedied it,” he said.
He added that the operations resulted in eliminating third-party payments. “Payments are now made through the airline’s website or through a trusted party; also credit card companies and banks started applying more secure measures following PCI standards [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards].”
In the UAE, he said, the Central Bank played a significant role in enforcing these standards.
Lt Col Al Hajiri said that cybercrime is international, but most of these criminals operate from countries in Africa and Asia, where law enforcement is weak or have no cybercrime laws.
“We had arrested a man here in Dubai before the first operation, which was providing logistical support to criminals abroad, and they had processed transactions worth one million dirhams in Dubai,” Lt Col Al Hajiri said.
“Emirates airline was one of the companies that worked closely with us on these operations and we want to especially thank Shaikh Ahmad Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Civil Aviation, Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates airline and Group,” he said.
Fraudulent activities related to airline ticket booking in Dubai gone down to almost zero
Major Khalil Ebrahim Al Mansouri, Assistant to the Dubai Police Chief for Criminal Investigation Affairs, said that airline fraud has become an international phenomenon in the past few years, starting around 2009.
“The global aviation industry loss due to airline fraud averages $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) a year,” he explained.
In most cases of airline fraud, criminals either set up fake companies or claim they bought tickets in bulk for less, and offer cheap flights on their fake websites or on social media. When an unsuspecting member of the public agrees to buy tickets from the criminals, they take the money in cash and use stolen credit cards or credit card information to buy the ticket.
When the bank finds out the credit card is stolen and reports it to the airline, the airline loses the ticket’s money, and in some cases the person who bought the ticket loses their ticket.
Lt Col Saeed Al Hajiri, Director of the Cyber Investigation Department at Dubai Police’s Criminal Investigation Department, said cybercrimes have a global dimension and boths criminals and victims are based in foreign countries, which makes it difficult to control.
“Cybercrime cannot be combatted by one department, it requires international cooperation and also the cooperation of the affected parties, like banks, airline and credit card companies,” he said.
