JEDDAH, 21 June 2007 — Jeddah police said yesterday they are still searching for a Yemeni national who was allegedly hired by two Nigerian men in their 20s to use a stolen credit card to buy SR45,000 worth of furniture from a store off Madinah Road.
The two African men were arrested on Saturday with a credit card that had been stolen while it was in the mail to Susan Slowe, a resident of a small community near Bangor, Maine, in the United States. The credit card was mailed inside the United States on June 1. Eleven days later, it was in Jeddah being used to buy furniture.
“This is not the first case involving similar credit card scams,” said a Jeddah police officer who works undercover. “We have dealt with similar things before and they have made us keep our eyes wide open for these scams.”
Authorities say that in addition to the Yemeni man being sought for charging SR45,000 at the furniture store, the two Nigerians were caught after they attempted to make numerous gold purchases totaling about SR35,000 at Jeddah’s Al-Hijaz Market in the Baghdadiyah District near the historic city center. Vendors at the market tipped off the police, saying that two Nigerian men were trying to use a card in a woman’s name at the market.
Police initiated a surveillance operation and arrested the men in the market in possession of Susan Slowe’s credit card. Police said the men tried to flee but were quickly apprehended. The two men initially said the card belonged to their sister. “Their statements kept changing,” said the undercover officer.
“Their story smelled more and more fishy. The question that I didn’t have any answer for at the time was: Why was the card still valid?” Police speculated that perhaps the crooks somehow reactivated a canceled card using computer equipment.
An Arab News investigation tracked down the owner of the card, Susan Slowe, a county assessor 12,000 kilometers away in the community of Vanceboro, Maine: population 147.
“I got an e-mail from Bank of America on Monday (June 11) saying that there was possibly fraud on my account,” she told Arab News by phone.
June 11 was the date the Yemeni suspect made the SR45,000 purchase.
Slowe says she was waiting for a newly issued card from Bank of America to arrive at her home address. The card was mailed to her from the bank on June 1 and somewhere along the way, identity thieves stole it. Slowe says the crooks activated the card by simply changing her account information through a customer service representative who only asked for the customer’s date of birth. The card was still active because Slowe had no idea that it had been stolen or that it was so easy to activate a newly issued card.
“I honestly believe the credit card companies need to do more for security,” she said.
Meanwhile, back in Jeddah the two Nigerian men caught with Slowe’s card confessed that they had paid the Yememi to test the card with a large furniture purchase. Police questioned the furniture store vendor to gather testimony they hope will lead to the capture of the suspect.
Bank of America and Susan Slowe confirmed to Arab News that the SR45,000 purchase was posted as a pending charge for $12,000, but that the charge was never finalized and was blocked by the bank. However, on the Jeddah-side of the transaction, the payment appeared to have cleared. The furniture store representative told Arab News that apparently the furniture was ready to be picked up from a branch in Makkah. Investigations are ongoing, but police say credit card fraud is prevalent and part of a global network.
Authorities warn vendors to be very careful to check identification and not to process payments from customers without identification or who are using cards in other people’s names. Vendors could risk losses if a transaction that appears to clear is blocked because a bank later identifies the transaction as fraudulent.
In a similar case four months ago, police arrested a group of seven people of different nationalities; five of the seven worked as vendors in shops in Jeddah’s city center. The other two men were Nigerians who were paying the vendors to process fraudulent transactions. In that case, five cards were used in the scam. Arab News obtained a list of the five names that appeared on these stolen cards; HSBC and Citibank were two of the card issuers and all five were issued in the United States.
