Ajman: Ajman Criminal Court has sentenced a 31-year-old woman from a Gulf country to ten years in prison for defrauding a woman of her gold jewellery worth Dh80,000, using a phone SIM card and passports fraudulently obtained from others.
The court heard that an expatriate woman had informed the police that she had rented her gold jewellery worth Dh80,000 to a woman bearing identity documents from a Gulf country. She was told that the jewellery would be returned to her after a week. When she didn’t get the jewellery back after a week, she lodged a complaint with the police. She also produced the gold-leasing document before the police as a proof.
Investigators from the police then found out that the mobile phone number used by the accused actually belonged to a person who worked as a real estate broker in a UAE company. This person told the investigators that a woman had approached him and wanted to rent an apartment. She had shown him a copy of her identification documents on her mobile phone and had also shown him a copy of her passport. She then requested the man to lend her his phone SIM card for a week, before she could get her own. The man handed her his SIM card, which was later used by the woman to cheat the victim.
The man claimed that he let her use his SIM card because she was crying, saying that she had lost her original identity documents and needed to make some urgent phone calls. She had also asked him for Dh3,000 and said that she had mortgaged her gold. She said she would have the gold released from the mortgage, sell it off and return him the money.
The investigators later also found out that the accused woman had fraudulently used the identity documents obtained from another woman to pull off the con job!
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During interrogation by Public Prosecution, the woman who was cheated of her identity documents, said that she had placed an advertisement on a website, saying that she needed a loan of Dh200,000 and put her phone number. Two days later, the accused contacted her and said that she knew a woman who could loan her Dh40,000, but would need to keep the borrower’s original passport as a guarantee.
The victim then told the accused that she did not have her passport with her, but she could give her the passports of her daughters and their identity documents as guarantee. The accused then sent an Arab man to collect the documents. However, after the documents were handed over to that person, the accused could not be contacted any more.
