UAE Targeted by Fraudsters

How it goes: you get a call from a ‘No Number’ and most probably it’s a sweet female who’s trying hard to fake an American accent. Then she hits you with the wonderful news:

Congratulations, sir! You’ve won the lottery!

The prize is more than 50 thousand dollars! WHAT? But I never bought a lottery ticket! They know your full name, so forget about the fact that you never bought a ticket. You’re the winner, MAN!

Now to complete the transfer of the money, all you need to do is give them your credit card number, the expiry date and the 3 digits in the back. Wow that’s easy, but what do they need my credit card for? To transfer the money, stupid! Oh ok, in that case, there you go.

Now I don’t exactly know what they do with your credit card after that, but I’m sure it’s not something sweet.

It was discussed last week on the Emirati Dr. Phil show (Bu Rashid from Radio Ajman) where people called to complain that they’ve been getting international calls from people trying to con them into giving them their credit card numbers, one of them did but called his bank who immediately cancelled any incoming/outgoing transaction.

You might be smart enough to know that it's all a crock of poop, but somebody doesn’t, so please help by spreading the word.

The longer version of this can be found on my blog.