In The (real life second hand) News: The Thief and The Man Tracker

As I have blogged recently, I go to Arabic class every Sunday and Wednesday evening. Since it is the summer session, we are a small class, only 4 students and only one is male, I will call him Peter (which is not his real name … kind of a standing joke in the class but wouldn’t really make sense to repeat here). Anyway, my class-mate “Peter” was uncharacteristically late for class yesterday but he had a most brilliant excuse and shared with us the events of his weekend (this is a rather long post so grab a chair):

Since we often have to speak in class (in Arabic) about what we did today or yesterday or on the weekend, we all know quite a bit about each other’s lives. Our mate Peter is training to climb Mount Kilimanjaro this winter so he frequently goes to the gym and for massages. This weekend was no different: a work out and a massage … but that’s when things took a different twist.

Some banks here have an SMS notification service; after every transaction on your account, you receive a text message. For my bank it is a paid subscription. I had it for a short trial period and the messages are nearly instantaneous! I was still standing at the ATM waiting for my money when the message came through! If only they were that fast and reliable with all their services! But I digress.

Shortly after his massage, our mate Peter started to receive a series of text messages from his bank … crikey! Seems his credit card went shopping without him! He called immediately to cancel the card and then called the Police.

For matters of this nature, the Police are rather nonchalant especially if it involves an ex-pat. One must make a claim in person and even then, without a bank statement, they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do anything. With this in hand, he returned to the Police station but still not much action. Only a, “We’ll catch him” with the feet up on the desk and an “insha’allah” which is a vague phrase meaning literally, “if God wills it” or sometimes, “hopefully” but in this case, “I can’t promise you anything so sorry ‘bout your luck, fella”.

Our mate Peter was not deterred and decided to do some detective work of his own. The first transaction, according to the statement, was at “The Nutrition Centre” for body building supplements and lip balm. So he started calling all the locations in Dubai. After a few calls he got a match, seems the purchase was made at the store in Ibn Battuta mall. Peter raced down to the mall to speak with the clerk but the description of the thief was not very clear, only that it was a man with a black back-pack.

The next transaction was within a short time of the first, about 10 minutes and Ibn Battuta is a big mall, it takes more than 10 minutes to get out of the mall to your car so the second purchase was likely also in IBM. But the problem is that the name of the retailer is usually not the same as the name of the credit card merchant. So our mate Peter walked the mall until, low and behold, he found the merchant, a perfume shop. Indeed, they also had a record of the thief’s purchase and even better, they had cameras!

Peter thought he had hit the motherlode. He had already suspected that the card was stolen from the gym and the purchase at the Nutrition place confirmed that. The gym is located in his building so the list of possible suspects is greatly reduced, probably one of the other residents and probably someone he has seen before. Not so! The man on surveillance tape was a stranger. But at least he now knew what the guy looked like.

At this point, the police were still not very helpful so our mate Peter continued the search on his own.

The next logical stop for this episode of Man-Tracker was the gym. From the sign-in sheet, he got a list of names of people at the gym for around the same time his credit card grew legs and armed with the list, our mate Peter used what any good detective would use to track a hardened criminal … Facebook! And sure enough, the thief had a profile complete with color photo! The building door man recognized the color photo and confirmed, Mr. Thief was a regular at the gym but not a resident (which tells you how reliable security really is at these buildings … mine included). Anyway, Mr. Thief was planning to be back the next day.

So the following day, our mate Peter waited around at the gym for Mr. Thief to arrive … and waited … and waited … and eventually Mr. Thief did not disappoint. A quick call to the Police (who apparently could now take action since the case was solved) arrested the thief, clad only in a pair of swimming trunks.

As it turns out, Mr. Thief was probably in the country illegally, spoke very little English and spoke no Arabic whatsoever. He spoke only Italian and might have caught a break because of the language barrier but this was not his lucky day. Our mate Peter is Belgian and as is the case with many Europeans, he speaks several different languages fluently, Italian being one of them. By now he also speaks enough Arabic to communicate with the Police and most locals, no matter who they are, are very impressed to see an ex-pat attempting to use the language.

Our mate Peter was given two choices: Mr. Thief could repay the 3000 Dirhams (about $1000CND) in charges on the card, sign a letter apologizing and swearing he will never do it again and go free. Or our mate would forego the repayment and Mr. Thief would face the courts for theft and fraud. Mr. Thief was initially very arrogant and denied everything. Only after a phone call did he come to realize the pickle he was in. Our mate Peter had already made up his mind and Mr. Thief will probably be jailed for 3 to 5 years and then be deported. We suggested to Peter that he could recoup his money by selling his story to the newspapers :-)

A couple of things come to mind about this story:

Firstly, our mate Peter recited most of his story to the class in Arabic with a little help from the teacher for some words we haven’t learned yet (and surprisingly I understood most of it.) That was impressive but now the bar has been raised. When it came my turn to speak and I could barely string together a single sentence, I realized I need to kick it up a notch … there’s that competitive streak again!

Secondly, Dubai is very safe BUT things do still happen here same as anywhere else. And don’t assume the Police will be interested in helping. There may have been a different reaction had it been a local making the accusation but luckily, my classmate was persistent and in the end, he prevailed. At the best of times, things happen in the Middle East on their own schedule and in their own way which is not necessarily efficient nor fair. That’s just the way it is.

Lastly, that SMS notification service by the bank is more than just an interesting novelty! I think I will subscribe. Also going to keep a closer eye on my wallet! Its good to learn from experience, even better when you can learn from some one else’s!