ALKHOBAR, 22 February 2005 — Information and communications technologies are wondrous. We no longer could function without them. But sometimes their use doesn’t lead to the desired goal and generally that’s not the fault of the systems.
Many Saudi banks are pushing the use of special Internet cards for making online purchases. The idea behind the cards is to reduce the liability of both the issuer and the user by these cards having low credit limits and being restricted to online use. It’s a nice idea but what happens when international payment gateways refuse to accept them?
That’s exactly what happened to me. I wanted to buy a book online. Thanks to my broadband connection, I am no longer constrained by government censors. A large amount of literature unavailable in the Kingdom may be purchased online and downloaded directly into a local workstation. I needed to pay for my purchase through a payment gateway at 2checkout.com but I couldn’t. 2checkout refused to accept payment using any credit card issued from a Saudi financial institution. The next day I attempted to buy a similar book from another source. That payment gateway, Clickbank, allowed payment with credit cards issued in the Kingdom but it declined payment with the online credit card from Banque Saudi Fransi. The transaction was eventually completed with an Internet credit card from the Saudi British Bank.
A customer service representative reached at Banque Saudi Fransi stated that the bank had encountered similar difficulties in the past few years and it was at the discretion of individual business to accept or refuse payment with any credit card. There is already a trend to blacklist Saudi IP addresses. I wonder if soon Saudi consumers will be banned from participating in e-commerce activities at the sites still open to them?
In an effort to bring greater accountability to financial transactions done through Saudi banks, last year the government put forward a regulation requiring Saudi banks to have full identification details on all customers. As a part of the enforcement of that regulation the banks entered into their systems the expiration date of each customer’s official identification. This is now having ramifications that most Saudi banking customers never considered.
Take the case of one expatriate who is a customer of Al-Imtiaz at the Saudi British Bank. Al-Imtiaz customers have bank balances of at least SR250,000. One fine day last month the man went to a banking machine to withdraw a bit of cash and found that he could not. Calling the bank’s customer service representative, he was told that his account was frozen.
“Why is my account frozen?” asked the man.
“Your iqama expired,” answered the bank’s rep.
“My iqama originally expired today,” replied the man.
“But actually it was renewed two days ago.”
“Well, the system automatically freezes the account on the date of the iqama expiration and until you bring us the new iqama your account remains frozen,” stated the bank’s rep.
“Why wasn’t I informed about this policy?” asked the expat.
“The system should have sent you a letter informing you that the account would be frozen on the expiration of your iqama,” said the bank’s rep.
The fact is that no letter ever arrived at the account holder’s post office box. His account was frozen for five days until his employer was able to bring the new iqama from Riyadh to Alkhobar. Interestingly, the expat was able to survive for the five days his account was frozen by charging all his necessary purchases to his credit card — issued against his account at the Saudi British Bank.
The last tale we have today fortunately has a good outcome — even if getting to the goal took quite a circuitous route. Indian national Muhammad Ansari and his family went to Haj this year. Their journey of a lifetime concluded with Ansari’s mobile phone being snatched by a pickpocket.
“During Haj I carried a small travel bag with many pockets that contained all our important documents and my mobile telephone,” Ansari explained. “After I finished the pilgrimage I came out from the Holy Haram and made a telephone call. Seeing my family approaching, I quickly finished the call and put the handset in the front pocket of the bag. Usually I put the phone in an inside pocket but I was in a hurry and made a mistake. It was to cost me dearly.”
Ansari and his family left the Grand Mosque and pushed across a small side street lined with shops and packed with pilgrims. As they emerged from the crowd Ansari looked down and saw that the front pocket of his bag was opened and his phone was gone.
“It was a terrible shock when I realized my phone had been stolen,” Ansari said. “It is a Nokia 6600 and I’d invested over SR2,000 in it. So all my investment and all my contact numbers were gone.”
Ansari made his way home with some of the joy taken away from his Haj. Two days after he returned to the Eastern Province he received a call on his home telephone from someone who spoke only Arabic. Ansari could not understand what the caller wanted and decided that it must have been someone dialing a wrong number. But then, two days after that he got a surprise. One of his friends rang Ansari to advise him that the police were looking for him. They’d found his handset when they’d arrested a Sudanese pickpocket in Makkah.
The police officer assigned to the case had activated the phone and dialed numbers in the address book until he located someone who could speak Arabic and could advise him of Ansari’s location. Of course Ansari immediately rang the police officer to claim the handset. Sure enough, it was the same voice he’d heard on his home telephone a few days earlier. There was a logistics problem in completing the official paperwork but once that issue was overcome, the handset was released and on its way back to its rightful owner. Ansari is delighted with the outcome and commends the Makkah police for ensuring that his Haj had the happiest of endings.
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