DUBAO: Growing magic pen frauds in signing cheques in Dubai is emerging a new phenomenon in financial crimes in Dubai. In recent days, 20 cases have been reported to Dubai police involving magic pen frauds worth millions of UAE dirhams.
Dubai Police has warned the public against signing cheques in which the amount and other details are filled in by someone else, as they could be using a ‘magic pen’ with disappearing ink.
Pointing to 20 cases of people falling victim to a the ‘magic pen’ scam, Dubai Police said the ‘magic pens’, which are illegal, have a kind of ink that disappears 20 minutes to two hours of use.
The ‘magic pen’ is used in different kinds of transactions like purchase of cars, commodities or for settling debts, according to Gulf News report.
Lt Colonel Dr Ali Khalifa Al Falasi, director of the Documents Scan Section at the General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology in Dubai Police, who dealt with several cases of magic pen fraud in 2020, said: “The cheque cases were worth millions of dirhams. Our experts with advanced technology managed to detect the fraud by verifying the signature and other details on the cheques.
People should use their own pens while signing and writing cheques or documents and never put their signature on cheques written by others.”
However, Lt Col Al Falasi said that they scan the documents and cheques with latest technologies using a certain type of radiation and the filters are capable of assessing what was originally written with the disappearing ink and the changes that are subsequently made out.
