Golden Age Investments

We thought this was going to be our new company site for our Dubai office.

But it is now going to be a warning about dealing with a scam that purports to offer finance through the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) - pictured at right.

The scam originates with someone pretending to be Dr Omar Bin Sulaiman, the Director of the DIFC. He will get in touch with you, communicate with you by phone on a daily basis for weeks - offering to invest in your business.

There is a CONDITION - the (fake) investment can only happen if you are incorporated in the UAE - which will, of course (ahem!), require payment. They will use the name and website of a genuine business broker to handle the incorporation - but the employee you deal with will be fake, and the bank account will be theirs - and NOT the bank account of the company you think you are dealing with.

If you pay the incorporation fees, then you will be hit with another demand for a (much bigger) fee to get yourself a local address in Dubai - which has "suddenly" become a requirement for you to receive the promised funding.

The contracts you see will be forged - one that was sent to us even had the signature of the DIFC's Chief Justice, Sir Anthony Evans, on it.

We were sent emails with domains that were mainly from mail2world.com addresses - with uae as the domain -- eg drobsulaiman@mail2uae.com

When you see the uae in the email, you think the email is from the uae -- but UAE domain names end in .ae -- the address above is a free .com email address.

These guys use Skype accounts with the photo of the real Dr Bin Sulaiman (same as the web site) showing on the skype account. The photo is intended to fool you into thinking you are dealing with the genuine director of the DIFC.

You will be invited to come to Dubai as an honoured guest. Everything will be designed to make you think you now have a wealthy and influential investment partner in the Middle East. Just as long as you can keep it all "confidential" until after the funding is approved - which means you are not to ring Dr Bin Sulaiman at work (where you could check out his voice and story) - so as his board does not know he has a financial partnership in the business he is about to approve for funding.

He will even line your company up with an "influential lawyer" - in our case it was some supposed sister-in-law of President Mubarak of Egypt.

All the while, telling you "in the name of Allah", how concerned he is to help you grow your business.

These guys were able to advertise on, and put promotional material on, an Australian government website (a state government, not the federal one) - which was how we came into contact with them. That website was suffixed with".gov.au" - implying that either their computer skills are good enough to alter government websites, or the criminals have help from within western governments.

The group we dealt with used ip addresses in Eastern Europe. Part of the fraud network is based in Tblisi, Georgia, with another part of the network co-ordinated and operating from Seattle, in the state of Washington, USA. The data trail points to the fraud network being part of a funding scheme to destabilise the Caucasus region of the southern Russian states, and to make it difficult for Russia to have control, influence or financial interest in the oil pipelines flowing through the region.

The question "Who benefits?" has two answers. Firstly "beneficiaries" include the fraudsters who are able to use some of the stolen money to lead the high life, staying at resorts and hotels. And secondly, western oil interests who want to see the oil pipelines under westen control.

The money stolen via the fraud can then be channelled from Tblisi into Chechnya, and into terrorist operations such as the 2010 terrorist bombings in Moscow.

To disguise the political agenda behind the fraud, the group in Eastern Europe re-route some of their ip addresses through Nigeria -- to make the fraud look like another "Nigerian fraud".

For more information on Advance Fee, 419 type scams in general, and this DIFC/Dr Omar Bin Sulaiman fraud in particular, see the links at left.