Filipino scammers pretend as Dubai Crown Prince

For more than a year, hundreds of individuals throughout the world are being targeted and scammed by a well-organized gang comprising several notorious criminals who are robbing-off huge amount of cash by falsely pretending as His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai. Although some of the victims said, the person who had spoken to them over phone was having “Nigerian accent”, in reality, those scammers are Filipinos run by an individual named Hervé Jaubert, a former French Navy officer, marine engineer and DGSE secret agent with active collaboration of his Filipina wife Raquel Marquez. It may be mentioned here that, Hervé Jaubert, Raquel Marquez and Radha Stirling were the masterminds behind foiled attempt of abducting Dubai Princess Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Maktoum.

While the original Twitter handle of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum has more than 4 million followers, the fake handles namely ‘Fazza Hamdan Shekih [look here, these scammers even made spelling mistake as they wrote Shekih instead of Sheikh] created by the scammers have just one follower:

Just got the coveted “Crown Prince of Dubai “ follow.
Weird how he only has 1 follower. pic.twitter.com/7qouO8vmru

— John Aquino 🤷🏽‍♂️ (@DrJohnAquino) September 21, 2020

According to media reports, this scam racket based in the Philippines has been scamming millions of dollars from its victims by pretending as the Crown Prince of Dubai. Australian news site 6PR Perth in a report said:

An Australian woman lost about $15,000 after being scammed by someone she thought was Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai.

Karen, who chose for her real name to be kept private, told 6PR’s Liam Bartlett she fell in love and became victim to the sophisticated scam.

“Being in lockdown we are all a little bit lonely and a little bit vulnerable”, she said.

“I really thought he was the real person.

“I look back and say how stupid can I be”.

Karen eventually figured out she was being scammed after the man started to slip up on details.

“The more and more I questioned him, the angrier he got, the nastier he got, the more verbally abusive he got”, she said

“I was almost frightened to look at my phone to see if he had contacted me”.

Sophisticated operations have begun using new techniques to make their scams more believable, including using advanced software to fake video calls with victims, which happened in Karen’s case.

Executive chairman of International Fraud Watch Global, Ken Gamble, said there are few protections in place in Australia compared to other countries.

“They know that if they target Australians they can reap as much money as they want to, and they are really not going to have anyone coming after them”.

On March 20, 2023, a fake Twitter handle was created by an Gmail ID danielshepelevhot[at]gmail.com pretending as the Dubai Crown Prince, which was later suspended.

On June 19, 2020, AFP news agency in a factcheck titled ‘Facebook scam impersonates Emirati royal family’ said:

“Multiple Facebook posts purporting to represent the Crown Prince of Dubai have been circulating with claims that he is giving away millions to users who comment with the first letter of their name. However, this is a scam. There is no trace of the offer on the Emirati royal family’s official social media accounts and a link to claim the money leads to a website full of adverts.

“… Running a simple search on Facebook, AFP Fact Check found that Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum has an official Facebook page.

“Inspecting the prince’s official Facebook page, AFP Fact Check was unable to find any promotions or giveaways. The crown prince — popularly known as Fazza — is somewhat of a social media star, boasting ten million Instagram followers for his posts which regularly feature animals and sport.

“The prince’s official website is also linked to his Facebook page, which according to Facebook’s page transparency data, was created on February 10, 2010.

“The scammer’s page however was created less than a year ago, in November 2019”.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in a report said:

… Trolling for victims online “is like throwing a fishing line,” said Special Agent Christine Beining, a veteran financial fraud investigator in the FBI’s Houston Division who has seen a substantial increase in the number of romance scam cases. “The Internet makes this type of crime easy because you can pretend to be anybody you want to be. You can be anywhere in the world and victimize people,” she said. “The perpetrators will reach out to a lot of people on various networking sites to find somebody who may be a good target. Then they use what the victims have on their profile pages and try to work those relationships and see which ones develop”.

According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), which provides the public with a means of reporting Internet-facilitated crimes, romance scams—also called confidence fraud—result in the highest amount of financial losses to victims when compared to other online crimes.

In 2016, almost 15,000 complaints categorized as romance scams or confidence fraud were reported to IC3 (nearly 2,500 more than the previous year), and the losses associated with those complaints exceeded $230 million. The states with the highest numbers of victims were California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania. In Texas last year, the IC3 received more than 1,000 complaints from victims reporting more than $16 million in losses related to romance scams.

On October 14, 2017 the Gulf News in a report titled ‘Beware, Facebook scammers using UAE billionaires’ names’ said:

The next time you see famous UAE businessman Majid Al Futtaim’s photo or any of the country’s billionaires on Facebook with a fishy caption, “Majid: We will make everyone rich!”, beware and don’t fall for it.

Scammers are no longer content with just creating fake Facebook pages. They are now using photos and names of the UAE’s richest businessmen to lure their prey.

The fake pages surfaced just days after Forbes magazine published The World’s Richest Arabs 2017 list earlier this month.

Scammers were quick to “quote” billionaires Majid Al Futtaim, Saif Al Ghurair, Abdullah Al Ghurair and others in a get-rich-quick scheme using these men’s alleged secret to becoming rich.

If you click on one of the scams, a fake CNN Money article will appear to give the illusion that this “easy work at home trick” can make you rich and you can quit your job in 30 days.

At one point, it even used Forbes’ website link but with a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s’ to give the page credibility. Unsuspecting users can easily click on the page thinking it’s real only to be scammed.

Among them was Facebook user, M.T. who clicked on it and commented: “It’s a big scam! I tried to register, I didn’t even finish the process, I got so many phone calls from Canada and UK. Very strange really”.

Another user, Joyce, said she also got calls from the UK and Saudi Arabia.

Gulf News repeatedly contacted Facebook for comment and whether it would take action but received no response at press time. No comment was immediately available from Al Futtaim’s office.

The link redirects you to various fast cash pages, including the “testimonial” of a family that allegedly got rich through the scheme. It will also redirect you to a page that collects your information. “Enter your first name and best email to proceed. This qualifies you for an instant matching deposit bonus of up to $10,000” (Dh36,700), it says.

According to Facebook’s guidelines on how to avoid spams and scams, “scammers use these fake or compromised accounts to trick you into giving them money or personal information”.

Facebook advises users to “avoid responding and report the message to Facebook” if you’ve received a message that you believe is a scam. Facebook takes down pages that are proven to be scams.

Scammers have, in the past, used public figures in their scheme. Just in June this year, the name of Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Dubai Crown Prince, was used in a free hotel stay giveaway hoax.