Young filmmaker loses Dh11,500 in card cloning

DUBAI An amateur filmmaker has lost more than half of the Dh20,000 prize money he won at a short film competition, all in a suspected bank fraud.

Indian expat Mark Stanley, 22, who won the cash at a Dubai event earlier this year, claims he lost over Dh11,500 in 39 dubious transactions between September 12 and 19. The withdrawals, none of which he recognises, range from 4fils to Dh1854.92.

“It came as a real shocker to me. The figure on the slip I got after making an ATM withdrawal threw me off completely,” said Stanley recalling the moment he discovered that a large portion of the money he saved up in his Bank of Baroda savings account was gone.

“I had opened this account when I was a student and back then, there were no SMS facilities. I never got a whiff of all this until I personally visited the ATM to make a withdrawal, almost two weeks after the fraudulent transactions,” said the computer engineering graduate from Dubai.

Misuse

“When I visited one of the bank’s branches the next day for a detailed print-out of my bank statement, the fraud was there for all to see,” said the Keralite.

Sanjay Joshi, chief manager, operation and services at Bank of Baroda, told XPRESS: “Our preliminary investigation has revealed that the funds were withdrawn from the account in New York at various point of sale (POS) terminals in multiple transactions. Prima-facie, it appears a matter of debit-card cloning. Our Deira branch provided the details of the said transactions to the customer and has requested him to file a police compliant for further investigation in the matter.”

In August, XPRESS reported how an Indian couple Zubin and Anshu Vakil, also customers of the same bank, lost Dh30,000 over seven dubious transactions in the US. The couple has till date not been able to recover a single fils even as they hope for justice. Both parties appear to be victims of skimming.